Yahoo Messenger and some related features were down yesterday for nearly nine hours, apparently due to an unplanned equipment problem at one of the facilities where their servers are housed. Here's the scoop from product manager Sarah Bacon, as posted on the
Y! Messenger blog.
Maintenance work; you may experience service problems
December 5, 2008 on 3:13 pm
We are performing maintenance on our systems due to an unplanned power equipment issue at one of our third-party co-location facilities.
During this time, some versions of Yahoo! Messenger and its features, like Pingbox, may be temporarily unavailable. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience. We expect this maintenance to last several hours.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
UPDATE 1 (9:12 PST): It will be another few hours before we’re completely back up. Thanks everyone for your patience.
UPDATE 2 (11:11 PST): Yes, we’re still down but working hard to get everything back online. Thanks
UPDATE 3 (11:42 PST): Maintenance is now complete and normal service has been restored. Thanks everyone for your patience. Have a good weekend.
Of course, stuff happens, but I was disappointed that the cause of the outage wasn't more thoroughly explained.