Yahoo Mail users were surprised today by an upgrade that never went through, blocking them from accessing their inbox. Hundreds of users have taken to Yahoo Answers to try to figure out what’s happening.
Yahoo user “Brad” started a popular thread, “I got a message that Yahoo Mail has been upgraded, that it’s faster and easier to use. Yahoo said I needed to consent to the new terms of service. I clicked Accept and the screen blinks and gives me the same Accept or No Thanks option.”
We’ve received several emails from Yahoo users experiencing similar problems.
Ironically, when users logged in, they were greeted with a message reading, “Yahoo! Mail is now even faster, safer, and easier to use. Yahoo! now automatically identifies items such as words, links, people and subjects from your email to learn what matters to you so that we can deliver exciting new product features and relevant ads.”
Then, after accepting terms, many were either looped back to the same “accept terms” page or greeted by a failure message.
Many anticipated that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would make changes to Yahoo’s email service, which lags far behind Gmail. Looks like Yahoo hit its first speed bump in the overhaul.
Update: Yahoo has released the following statement, “Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and other areas of Yahoo! may currently be inaccessible or slow to respond to some users in certain locations. We are working to correct the issue and restore all functionality immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might be affected.”
Update (4:42 PM): Yahoo tells me the services have been restored: “Yahoo! Mail and other services are restored. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who were affected.” Yahoo PR also noted that no changes were made to the terms of service, users were just asked to agree again to the same terms of service.