Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo.com, the search engine that boasts itself as “the world’s most visited homepage” has acknowledged and apologized for a “temporary” outage on Yahoo.com around 2:15 p.m. PDT on Thursday, October 14.
However, the company has yet to explain what caused the outage. Any attempt to access the website resulted in a several-minute load time with an ultimate “Connection Timed Out” message (another attempt gave me this message: “internal error – server connection terminated“).
Yahoo.com failed to respond at about 2:30 PM PT or so, and that lasted for possibly around 20 minutes. During that time, visitors to the main Yahoo.com page were greeted by the message “Server hangup” and a blank page.
This is the error message some users saw when they tried to access Yahoo.com today. (Credit: CNET)
Kryssa Guntrum, Yahoo! Director of Global Product Communications, said in a statement, “For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to rectify it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected.”
However, it looks like it is only the front page and search engine that are down, as all of the other Yahoo pages functioned normally, Yahoo! Mail (mail.yahoo.com), Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), and Yahoo! Games (games.yahoo.com) are all still loading, albeit slowly.
A Yahoo spokeswoman acknowledged the outage, and said she could not say how widespread the outage was or how long it lasted or what caused it, but issued an apology on behalf of the company.
Recently, Yahoo has suffered a slew of executive departures, namely: Hilary Schneider responsible for the Americas, David Ko, senior vice president for audience, mobile and local, and vice president of media Jimmy Pitaro have all departed.
Incidentally, the outage comes amid rumors that AOL may be planning to join a bid to buy Yahoo. The rumors prompted a 6 percent rise in Yahoo’s stock today.