Glitch Hits Yahoo E-Mail

Tens of thousands of users of Yahoo’s free e-mail service couldn’t get into their accounts from late Saturday until Tuesday afternoon. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based Web portal and services firm blamed a software glitch that it said affected “less than two-tenths of 1%” of its e-mail users. Yahoo Senior Producer Lisa Pollock declined to say how many e-mail subscribers the company has, but the Web-based mail system is one of the most popular, along with Microsoft’s Hotmail, which has more than 60 million users. Yahoo services generally have a good reliability record, but some users complained of a two-day Yahoo mail outage in July. In its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo said: “The architecture utilized for our e-mail and certain other communications services was not primarily designed for this purpose, is highly complex and may not provide satisfactory service in the future.”