Yahoo continues to work frantically to fix its email service, which went down for some users around the world on Monday, Dec. 9. On Thursday morning at 5:30 PT Yahoo’s Customer Care division tweeted, “POP mail access is restored. Working on IMAP. Right now the best way to access email on mobile is w/ a Yahoo Mail app (iOS or Android).”
Yahoo first acknowledged the problem at 11 a.m. PT on Tuesday, blaming a “hardware problem” in one of its mail data centers.
“The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected. We have dozens of people working around the clock to bring it to a resolution,” it wrote in a blog post. “We believe our current efforts will restore our users’ access to their inboxes by 3 p.m. PT today. …”
But again, the issue proved trickier than anticipated.
At 3:30 p.m. PT, its self-imposed deadline past, Yahoo posted again to say it was still working on it.
By 5 p.m. it had service restored to Yahoo Mail accounts on the Web and to its apps for iOS, Android and Windows 8-running devices.
“You’ll notice that your most recent messages may not be appearing in your Inbox,” Yahoo blogged, saying that the oldest emails would start arriving first, but due to the backlog things were going slowly.
“For some of you, emails between 11/25 and 12/9 may not be showing up in your Inbox—we’re still working on bringing all accounts up to date,” Yahoo wrote. “We’re also working on restoring IMAP and POP access for those of you accessing your email through a non-Yahoo app (such as Outlook, Apple Mail or the native app on your phone).”
For those needing help (then or now) setting up Yahoo Mail on a mobile device, it offered a link to a Yahoo Help article.
With the calendar flipped to Thursday on the East Coast, Yahoo announced it had restored IMAP, as it tweeted later, but was still working on IMAP.
“The affected servers have been up and running for over six hours and we’ve already delivered 30 percent of messages sent during the outage,” Yahoo reported. “We expect all emails to be delivered by tomorrow [Thursday] afternoon.”
It’s unclear how many users have been affected—Yahoo has offered no numbers.
From the Middle East, Al Arabiya News reported that the outage was making “blood boil” in the region.
It published a tweet from Muna Abu Sulayman, a Saudi media personality, who wrote, “I don’t recall the last time anything made my blood boil #Yahoomail. When u r messing with our emails, u r messing w/ our work productivity.”
The report added that users had originally received a message saying that the service was down due to “scheduled maintenance.”
Yahoo has said it’s “sorry for the inconvenience this is causing.” With the restoration of IMAP, the world is likely to also receive some additional, public-relations-mending apologies.