Yahoo mail inaccessible to UK, US users after underwater cable cut

Internet users in the UK and the US could not access their Yahoo email accounts after an underwater cable was cut during maintenance work.

A notice on the help page of Yahoo's website said: "We are aware that Yahoo Mail is slow or inaccessible for some of our users. The issues were a result of an underwater fibre cable cut, caused by a third party while fixing a separate cable.

"The engineering team has rerouted email traffic to mitigate accessibility issues. A cable repair ship has been mobilised and will be at the site this weekend. We apologise for the inconvenience as we certainly understand email is a critical service for our customers."

"Some Yahoo Mail users are experiencing delays in accessing and viewing their mail. We'll be posting updates regularly on this page to keep everyone informed of our progress. Thank you for your patience as we work to fully resolve this," the notice added.

The details first emerged with the firm saying on Twitter that there was an issue.
According to analytics firm, ComScore, Yahoo Mail, the service worst affected by the cable cut, had 298 million users worldwide at the last count in late 2012.

The engineering team had rerouted email traffic to mitigate accessibility issues, Yahoo said.

While some users have been experiencing problems with the service for what appeared to be couple of days, reports of problems surged in the UK this morning, with the number of users reporting an issue rising from less than 20 to more than 1,300 in two hours, ITV reports.

News of Yahoo's outage comes only days after the company entered into a deal with Mozilla to become the default search engine for Firefox users in the US, with the firm ditching Google after 10 years.