Yahoo and AOL mail are down for many –here's what we know about the outage

Yahoo and AOL's email services have been hit by an outage that's affecting thousands of users right now, with most reporting log-in issues.

The issues started at around 10.50am ET / 3.50pm GMT, when a large spike in reports appeared on Downdetector. At the time of writing, there are over 1,000 reports in the US, with users of both services in the UK also reporting email problems.

Both Yahoo and AOL have now confirmed the issue on X and say they are "actively investigating it". Yahoo, which is backed by the private equity company Apollo, currently owns AOL, but Bending Spoons recently announced a deal to buy AOL.

Here's everything we know about the latest Yahoo and AOL email outage, which follows a similar incident in July...

AOL reports on the rise

A Downdetector graph showing reports of an AOL outage

(Image credit: Downdetector)

Yahoo and AOL are currently attempting to oust Shopify for the title of 'biggest Cyber Monday' outage – with thousands reporting log-ins issues across the US and UK.

Right now, the numbers aren't as big as the peaks we saw during July's similar outage, when several thousand AOL users complained about email issues. But the reports are climbing quickly, currently sitting at just over 1,000 in the US.

Both Yahoo and AOL have acknowledged the problems many are experiencing access their mail accounts, but haven't yet estimated when a fix might be rolled out.

What have Yahoo and AOL said?

This is now a confirmed issue, with Yahoo and AOL both posting identical updates on their X accounts – they are currently part of the same company, after all.

As you can see in Yahoo's message, these problems don't appear to be affecting everyone – with the messaging of "some users" also reflected in the Downdetector numbers.

In reply to that post, one user says that "the emails I sent since around 11:15AM are showing as "queued" and won't go through". So this isn't just affecting log-ins – for many, there appears to be a server issue affecting email in general.

Yahoo Mail now the worst hit

A Downdetector graph showing Yahoo Mail problems

(Image credit: Downdetector)

Yahoo Mail is now heading towards the 2,000-report mark on Downdetector in the US, which matches the early peaks we saw during July's big outage – so it's now becoming a major problem for many.

I haven't been able to replicate the issues, logging into my Yahoo Mail account (for the first time this year) with no issues. But the frustration is understandably growing for many on social media, with many reporting that the website UI is now very slow to load...

What's causing this?

Right now, there are no known issues at big cloud providers like Google Cloud – I say this because there's also been a spike in reports on Downdetector for OpenAI, which also uses Google's computing services among others.

That means Yahoo and AOL's issues are seemingly separate from the ones affecting Shopify, which have proven a Cyber Monday nightmare for many small business owners. But there are clearly some big cloud-based disruptions today.

There have been no more updates from Yahoo or AOL on X, so we can only speculate at the causes of today's email problems...



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