have you been without e-mail from your favorite mailing lists?  Here's
why.  What's their secret excuse?  it isn't as if two of the world's
tallest buildings collapsed on the switching station used to provide the
Internet connection, as what happened to vicug-l following the terrorist
attacks on September 11.

Kelly


Yahoo glitch trips up e-mail
 CNET.com

By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

March 4, 2002, 5:35 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-851276.html

Members of Yahoo's free e-mail list service are without a clubhouse.

Yahoo Groups, a collection of discussion lists based on various
interests, has been inaccessible from the online portal's Web site since
Monday morning, Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako confirmed. The outage, noted
in a message on the Yahoo Groups home page, has prevented millions of
members from receiving e-mail from their cohorts.

Osako would not discuss details of the problem, but she said it is
hardware-related.

"We're working aggressively to fix the problem and to institute new
processes to protect against similar incidents in the future," said
Osaka, adding an apology to Yahoo Groups users.

An outage on the group e-mail service affects 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 but 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 the outage is
unrelated to the combination of the services.

But with impending changes, some Yahoo Groups users 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., said 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. Ahhhh, Yahoo!"

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


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