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Yahoo! Mail users see crying baby who says firm is 'over capacity'

If only there was some sort of scalable server system around

Updated It's a bad Monday morning for the server managers at Yahoo! after the firm's Mail service took a dive at around 11am Pacific Time (7pm UTC).

Yahoo! crying baby

Users aren't crying, they're fuming

Visitors to the site have been getting a ClipArt-style graphic of a crying baby with the message "Sorry, we are over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again."

Judging from the response on Twitter, Yahoo! customers aren't amused. The crying baby picture isn't exactly calming people down, and there have been numerous claims from the disgruntled that they've had enough and are moving to Gmail, citing the trouble Yahoo!'s service has had in the last few months.

In December, the service faceplanted spectacularly, with a four-day outage for some. The problems were so severe that CEO Marissa Mayer publicly apologized, saying the outage was down to a "particularly rare" problem.

Then at the end of January, many Yahoo! Mail users were told that they should reset their passwords after databases run by a third-party were breached. No accounts were directly hacked, the company said, but it increased its use of two-factor authentication to get into accounts.

So far the current outage looks to be far from complete, with some users reporting getting into their inboxes, but the Downdetector service monitoring engine is reporting 4,716 complaints so far and more to come, based on how the outage is developing.

So far there has been no word from Yahoo! as to the cause of the issues, but for a company that wants to become a major internet hub again, it would be embarrassing if this outage really is down to something as (relatively) simple as server provisioning. ®

Update

"Web access has now been fully restored for Yahoo Mail users. We're sorry for the inconvenience!" Yahoo! told El Reg in an emailed statement.

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