Yahoo Groups recovers from outage

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
March 5, 2002, 11:25 AM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-851276.html

Yahoo on Tuesday restored service to its free e-mail discussion lists
after hardware problems knocked out communication lines for millions of
members.
Yahoo Groups, a collection of discussion lists based on interests, was
revived by about 6:30 a.m. PST Tuesday after being inaccessible from the
online portal's Web site since Monday morning, Yahoo spokeswoman Mary
Osako said. The outage prevented millions of members from receiving
e-mail from their cohorts.

Osako said the problem was hardware related.

The outage on the group e-mail service affected a broad audience. Yahoo
Groups drew about 9.5 million unique visitors in January, according to
Net measurement company Jupiter Media Metrix.

The service's existence is the result of Yahoo's acquisition of eGroups
in summer 2000, when it paid roughly $432 million in stock for the
list-hosting company. At the time, the service had roughly 17 million
members and 800,000 e-mail lists.

Yahoo is in the process of merging its Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Clubs, a
similar Web-based community that uses online posting and instant chat to
communicate.

Yahoo said it started integrating the services two weeks ago and plans
to have the project finished by the end of March. Osako said Monday that
the outage was unrelated to the combination of the services.

But with impending changes, some Yahoo Groups customers say the service
has become increasingly unreliable and inundated with advertisements.

"Some of the groups require quick transfer of information or it would
become worthless," Craig Ochs, who lives in Brookfield, Wis., wrote in
an e-mail. Ochs is the moderator of an aviation-related group that
trades information about security breaches and business news in real
time. "Yahoo has been less than reliable, and rumors abound about them
starting to charge for the service."

Osako said the company does not have plans to start charging for its
Groups service.


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