While the latest statement from Yahoo's chief executive officer Marissa Mayer revealed that the multi-day outage of the Yahoo Mail that started Monday night has only affected one percent of its users, it has been a PR disaster for the company, with social media clearly screaming the sentiments of affected users and putting on spotlight how the firm poorly handled the problem that dogged its free web mail service.
Mayer issued an apology through Yahoo's official Tumblr blog on Friday.
"This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry... This week, we experienced a major outage that not only interrupted that connection, but caused many of you a massive inconvenience - that's unacceptable and it's something we're taking very seriously. Unfortunately, the outage was much more complex than it seemed at first, which is why it's taking us several days to resolve the compounding issues," Mayer wrote.
An Update on Yahoo Mail - yahoo: by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO This has been a very frustrating week for our... https://t.co/eexUUL4dEr
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) December 14, 2013
Yahoo attributed the problem to a hardware issue in one of its data centers. Instead of resolving the problem by Tuesday, the problem ensued with service restoration being done as of reporting.
"As of this afternoon, we've restored access to almost everyone and delivered the backlog of messages. We will continue to work on rolling out IMAP access and to fully restore inbox state," Mayer added.
People were outraged with how Yahoo handled the problem with the company not updating the users immediately about the downtime and customer service not answering phone lines to answer inquiries from small business owners utilizing the service and the media that has been headlining the outage.
With Yahoo Mail users threatening to start an exodus to more reliable services, Mayer faces her toughest test as the CEO of Yahoo. She has achieved some feats to make the world notice the company again, from tweaking company practices to acquiring companies that can help Yahoo improve its position in the tech industry. The multi-day outage of Yahoo Mail puts a big dent on Mayer's big wall of accomplishments as Yahoo's head.
The Yahoo CEO ended her apology to the users of Yahoo Mail with a promise.
"Above all else, we're going to be working hard on improvements to prevent issues like this in the future. While our overall uptime is well above 99.9%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week."
Shares of Yahoo closed 0.97 percent up at $39.73 on the NASDAQ on Friday.