Yahoo Groups is a very popular platform used by many around the world for communications within large groups of people, like companies or parent-teacher associations and even family groups.
This service went down on November 17 and the hitch still has not been removed. This has inconvenienced thousands of people, and they are raising hell on online forums as a result.
String of Issues
As reported by users, they first found it difficult to even access the dedicated pages on the platform. Those who managed to login there realized that they could not do their normal activities like making posts or sending out messages. There are also chat platforms within the Yahoo Groups service, and the users were unable to start up any new conversations.
And the issue kept worsening. At each stage, the users faced more difficulties.
Yahoo Groups facilitates broadcasting messages to all group participants without the messages going to the spam folder. This broadcasting service was also not happening since November 17.
Complaints Received by Yahoo
It has been revealed that the issue became escalated and Yahoo continually received complaints from users with some or all the above difficulties the Yahoo Groups site was giving them.
And the worst part of it was that a whole week passed and there were hardly any improvements made to remove or fix the bug plaguing Yahoo Groups.
It is rare for websites like these to go through such an extended downtime. Where millions of users are hooked on to a service, it is indeed strange that a technology company like Yahoo could not quickly do the fire-fighting act and bring the functioning of the service under control.
Some Specific User Groups Severely Affected
While the downtime on Yahoo Groups did affect every stakeholder, there were some groups which suffered more than others.
One of them is the group which sends out bulk messages on the eve of the Black Friday shopping binge. Such people had to find alternate channels to communicate and reach their messages to their target audiences all over.
A particular group of parents lamented that their routine exchange of information among fellow parents was suspended during this downtime of Yahoo Groups. This group consists of over 2,000 members.
Yahoo Claims to Have Fixed It, Yet Some Still Complain
Yahoo put out a statement on its Twitter page that the issue stood resolved. This happened on November 24, a full week after the first set of complaints began on November 17.
However, there have been sporadic complaints still being posted that the Yahoo Groups service was still not fully functional—Either a message won’t go through or it takes too much time to get transmitted, and so on.
Many of the participants on the Yahoo Groups platform would have by now searched and found other alternate channels to remain in touch with each other.
Increasingly, the technology market is turning into a conventional business model where the customer is king and they don’t brook delays and deficiencies in service. Like changing a brand of a soap or a cosmetic, they will start looking elsewhere. Yahoo needs to buck up.
