Yahoo, one of the three busiest Websites in the world, was down for approximately 40 minutes on Oct. 14, from about 5:30 p.m. to 6:10 p.m. ET.
Yahoo spokesperson Kryssa Guntrum gave eWEEK no specific reason for the outage.
For an unspecified time, Yahoo’s home page simply displayed a plain text “Server Hangup” message in the browser. Other Yahoo features, such as Yahoo Mail, Calendar, Sports, News and Finance, appeared to not be affected by the outage.
A number of people on sites such as Mashable and SearchEngineLand commented on the outage.
A Yahoo staffer Tweeted, a bit wryly: “As some of you noticed, Yahoo.com was down for a bit this afternoon. We’re back up and running-sorry for the interruption!”
Yahoo was quick to respond-albeit by prepared statement-to the query from eWEEK.
“For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected,” Guntrum said via e-mail.
When the site came back up, some users reported to eWEEK that for a span of time the local news they were accustomed to seeing on the Yahoo home page was news from another city, and that the usual rotation of 32 top news stories was whittled down to four.
Only a few weeks ago, Yahoo brought a new data processing center online, located near Niagara Falls, N.Y. Yahoo wouldn’t say whether the outage had anything to do with the new data center.