As reported last week, the Yahoo Mail woes continued with a massive wave of outages resulting in a lot of angry users (as if there weren’t enough of them already). The company also took some flak in the media for how its PR department handled the situation.

Late on Friday, CEO Marissa Mayer took to the Yahoo corporate blog to apologize and explain the situation. Perhaps too little too late for some users, but at least it’s something.

She begins by explaining how important Yahoo Mail is and how frustrating of a week it had been, before offering an explanation of the outage:

On Monday, December 9th at 10:27 p.m. PT, our network operating center alerted the Mail engineering team to a specific hardware outage in one of our storage systems serving 1% of our users. The Mail team immediately started working with the storage engineers to restore access and move to our back-up systems, estimating that full recovery would be complete by 1:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday.

However, the problem was a particularly rare one, and the resolution for the affected accounts was nuanced since different users were impacted in different ways. Some of the affected users were unable to access their accounts, instead seeing an outdated “scheduled maintenance” page which was a confusing and incorrect message (this has since been corrected and updated). Further, messages sent to those accounts during this time were not delivered, but held in a queue.

Over the remainder of the week, we worked around the clock to restore access and all messages to inboxes. This has included restoring IMAP access for people using other email programs like Outlook or Apple Mail to access their Yahoo Mail.

As of Friday afternoon, she said, access had been restored for almost everyone, and the backlog of messages had been delivered. She said they would continue to work on rolling out IMAP access and to fully restore inbox state (like which folders messages were placed in, which were starred, etc.).

She closed the post by saying that Yahoo Mail’s overall uptime is 99.9%, but that they will work to prevent issues from happening again.

“We really let you down this week. We can, and we ill, do better in the future, she said.

The Yahoo Mail status page offered an update on Sunday night, saying that the engineering team had been working over the weekend and making “steady progress” on restoring access to messages for affected users and correcting inbox state. They noted that some timestamps may not appear correctly on some messages.

Are you a Yahoo Mail user? Is everything back to normal for you yet?

Image: Yahoo