• by Ray Schultz , February 18, 2018

Yahoo Mail experienced serious outages on Saturday, drawing thousands of complaints to Down Detector, many from iPhone users who were unable to access their email accounts.

The company acknowledged the problems in a customer service tweet that day.

“We are aware that some Yahoo Mail users are currently seeing issues when accessing their emails through a Mail app,” it says. “We apologize to those affected and are working quickly to fix it. You can try using the web or Yahoo Mail app to access your email in the meantime.” 

The outage, which apparently started early Saturday morning, has affected users in the U.S., the UK, and Europe. 

The breakdown left users “locked out of their emails and reminding some about the ongoing issues at Yahoo!,” the UK’s Express reports.

The Fresno Bee adds that “the issues were reported for mail apps in Apple devices, some on Twitter said their Android devices were also seeing the same issues.”

Apple Support “sent a tweet hours after users continued filing complaints on social media and said it was ready to help,” the Bee continues.

Among the complaints to Down Detector is one saying: “This is ridiculous a major company cannot fix this issue.... cannot retrieve emails on iPhone.”

Another complains: “Keeps telling me username and password invalid... which it is not .. I can log on through laptop but I can't walk around all day with laptop…”

One more user states that “phone email issue has been almost whole week now.” 

The slowdown also hit desktop users and those who tried to access their emails via “Samsung S$ on Sprint network,” in the words of one user.  And the gripes continued trickling in on Sunday.

“well I still can’t login on phone or desktop, how long is going to take,” another writes in a post dated Sunday night.

In a second report on Saturday evening, Down Detector reported issues, 59% about inability to log in, and 27% regarding failure to receive or send email.

Predictably, some are threatening to switch to another email provider. “ Never had a problem with google mail,” a user writes. “Have had yahoo mail much longer but will be switching permanently to Google. Google is now my default mail client.”