An outage at Yahoo Mail hit its fourth day on Thursday, prompting thousands of furious users to ratchet up their criticism on social media.<\/p>\n
Many people said they couldn’t retrieve emails from their inboxes or complained that emails were not being delivered.<\/p>\n
“We are continuing to work on resolving this and ask that you stay tuned for further updates,” Yahoo said in a message fired off on Twitter.<\/p>\n
The California-based firm on Wednesday apologized and promised a fix by the end of that day, but problems have persisted.<\/p>\n
Yahoo would not disclose the number of email accounts knocked out of service since late Monday night California time. It is estimated there are about 280 million Yahoo Mail users.<\/p>\n
“We are very sorry for recent difficulties with Yahoo Mail,” the company’s senior vice president of communication products Jeffrey Bonforte said in a short message posted on Tumblr.<\/p>\n
He blamed the outage on a “hardware problem” at one of Yahoo’s data centers.<\/p>\n
Some functionality was returning to the free Web-based email service as Yahoo scrambled to get it back in full operation.<\/p>\n
Yahoo Mail users turned to Twitter and online chat forums to unleash frustration at being cut off from email and threatening to switch to a free service offered by Google.<\/p>\n
Among complaints was a woman who complained having emailed invitations to a holiday party and not knowing what to expect because replies aren’t being delivered.<\/p>\n
“I need my account back!” a woman identified as Natalie Bean said in a message on Twitter.<\/p>\n
“Fix it so I can permanently switch emails!”<\/p>\n
The Yahoo Mail disruption marks a stumble for chief executive Marissa Mayer, who has made focusing on people’s “daily habits” such as email part of her plan to revive the faded Internet pioneer.<\/p>\n
Yahoo buys RockMelt to boost mobile, networking<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n