Yahoo sites hit by availability problems

http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070706/tc_infoworld/9002 6;_ylt=AvwYxgixKD90ny7uomqP8BsjtBAF
InfoWorld
Yahoo sites hit by availability problems

Juan Carlos Perez and Robert McMillan Fri Jul 6, 6:07 PM ET

San Francisco (IDGNS) - Yahoo suffered availability problems on Friday
that affected its home page as well as some of its other Web sites and
services for a sustained period of time.
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Yahoo, which has some of the most popular sites and online services
worldwide, first experienced problems on its home page at around 5:50
a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, said Dan Berkowitz, senior communications
director at Keynote Systems, a global provider of mobile and Internet
test and measurement services.

Yahoo.com's operations began getting back to normal at around 7:15
a.m., said Berkowitz. At its worst point, Yahoo.com's availability
dropped to around 60 percent, meaning that 4 out of 10 visitors
couldn't access the page, he said, citing data collected from
Keynote's global network of monitoring computers, which check the
availability of the world's most popular sites.

Yahoo didn't reply to requests for comments about the problems.

NetCraft also detected the problems, saying in a short note that the
intensity of the performance issues varied among geographical areas
and also among Yahoo services.

"The Yahoo.com home page was inaccessible for several hours from our
London monitoring station and responded more slowly than usual from
several locations in the U.S. Yahoo Search appears to have experienced
lengthier availability problems than the home page and other Yahoo
services," NetCraft reported.

A variety of bloggers also reported trouble Friday morning accessing
other Yahoo services like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail as well as
other Yahoo sites like the Flickr photo sharing site and the news
aggregation site Yahoo News.

Ideally, Yahoo and other major Internet players would never face Web
site outages, but they all do, said industry analyst Greg Sterling
from Sterling Market Intelligence. The key is to make sure that
significant availability problems happen infrequently. Otherwise,
users and advertisers get worried and upset, he said.

Yahoo's problems on Friday probably affected fewer users than usual
because many people are taking time off in the U.S. and are away from
their computers due to the July 4th Independence Day holiday,
Berkowitz said.