Yahoo CEO apologises for Yahoo Mail outage

In an apology, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said yesterday that she was ''very sorry'' for this week's Yahoo Mail outage, that had affected roughly 1 million users.

''This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry,'' she said in a post on Tumblr, adding that, ''we really let you down this week.''

Reports surfaced late yesterday that a number of major issues had been experienced with Yahoo Mail, an important service of the company with about 100 million daily users.

Though the company confirmed the outage at the time, details were sketchy regarding its cause or how many people had been affected. Mayer shed some more light on the fiasco in her post.

''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,'' she wrote.

The mail engineering team of Yahoo was alerted Monday night to a hardware outage, in one of the storage systems of the company serving 1 per cent of Yahoo's users she added.

This involved about a million users out of around 100 million daily users.

The Mail team immediately swung into action  to restore access and move to back-up systems, and a full recovery was expected by Tuesday afternoon, she wrote yesterday.

"This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry," Mayer said in a message at Yahoo-owned blog platform Tumblr.

"For many of us, Yahoo Mail is a lifeline to our friends, family members and customers," she continued.

"This week, we experienced a major outage that not only interrupted that connection, but caused many of you a massive inconvenience."

Users, angry with the outage, vented rage and frustration on Twitter, Facebook and other social media venues and many users said they were not able to retrieve emails from their inboxes or complained of non-delivery of emails.

Hundreds of users vowed to switch to rival services such as Gmail, it remained to be, however, whether they would follow-up with action.

According to commentators, the disruption marked a mild setback to Mayer's efforts, as shed had focused on making "daily habits" such as email part of her plan for the revival of the faded internet pioneer.