Yahoo Is Down, As If Carol Bartz Needed More Problems

Yes, according to multiple reports and our own experience (see left) Yahoo.com, the Internet’s biggest portal is currently down for the count, both in the US and abroad. Maybe the traffic behemoth couldn’t take all the “merging with AOL” speculation and just decided to take the day off?

From what it looks like Yahoo! subsites like mail.yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com are still up. The “Connection Refused” problem seems only be affecting Yahoo.com itself.

This is indicative of some serious issues as, in contrast to more mercurial services like Twitter, I’ve never seen the Yahoo homepage itself go down in my lifetime. And I am not alone, according to a former Yahoo employee commenting on Hacker News:

“This has to be Yahoo! Frontpage’s first downtime in over a decade. I know we’re not supposed to be posting articles about sites being down but: wow. I worked at Yahoo, and I firmly believed that it was literally impossible, at the architectural level, for frontpage to be unavailable.”

This outage also comes at completely the wrong time as the much beleagured Yahoo is rumored to be in buyout talks.

I have contacted Yahoo for more information and and they have confirmed that it is just the homepage and that they’re working on a fix. Comment

Update: It’s back up!

From Yahoo:

“For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected.”