Tech giant Yahoo Inc apparently had a bad week. After its Small Business and Mail services shut down, its image service Flickr went down on December 12 around 11AM Eastern Time, according to a report by TechCrunch. Moreover, it observed that the image site was not down for everyone, as Twitter posts about Flickr's outage achieved maximum velocity after noon that day, said the report.
The outage messages received by users were confusing, as indicated in the report. Some users said they received an inactivity timeout message, which read, "Description: Too much time has passed without sending any data for document." Others received an error message with an image of a Panda on a leash. TechCrunch believed the site is back up for some, but it remained unclear whether how many where affected, what caused the outage or whether the site is completely up for everyone.
TechCrunch tried to reach Flickr and found that its email has not gone through because the addresses thought to be for its press and public relations were deprecated. Since sending a request to a proper Yahoo address, the tech news site has yet to receive a response.
The outage of some of Yahoo's key Web services had also put a spotlight on its customer services. Kara Swisher of another tech news site, All Things D, called Mayer and Yahoo for their inadequate communication regarding its responses to the Web services outage. Regular customers from paying small business owners to mail users expressed their outrage over the capability of Yahoo's customer service team to handle complaints.
One user told TechCrunch, "Yahoo is so overwhelmed they cannot answer phone calls or reply to emails. I've been on hold for hours and hours since last Sunday, spoke twice to a real person who in both instances sent me to another number that is absolutely unreachable. They have shut down the websites of countless businesses. The last person I talked with [via phone] acknowledged they have no idea how many people they've impacted."
Prior to Mayer's lengthy apology today, her initial response to the Yahoo Mail outage was a brief Tumblr update containing only a link to a help document claiming that the Web service was restored, which was disputed by some users.
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