Yahoo Mail outage also took down BT, Sky and TalkTalk email

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Yahoo has restored its mail service following a seven hour outage that left users unable to send or receive messages.

The interruption also impacted customers of BT, Sky, and TalkTalk, all of whom use Yahoo Mail to power their email services.

The issues appear to have started at around 07:00 yesterday morning and continued until at least 14:30, when Yahoo said most of the problems had been fixed.

Yahoo Mail outage

“Most services are back online,” it said in a Tweet. “This is a technical issue that affected our services. We are sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience as we get everything back up and running.”

Three hours later, BT and Sky’s customer teams said they understood the issue had been resolved

“Yahoo! support teams have confirmed service have been restored,” said Sky. “Customers will now be able to access their Sky Yahoo! Mail account.”

“Yahoo has confirmed that most services are back online,” added BT. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience while your BT Yahoo email returns to normal.”

Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the world wide web but its popularity has declined significantly over the past decade and it was bought by Verizon in 2017. However its mail service still commands millions of users who will have been inconvenienced by this outage.

"Yesterday we had a global outage that impacted our trusted platforms," a Verizon Media spokesperson told TechRadar Pro. "All of our consumer services are up and running. This was caused by a technical issue related to a DNS error and we are working to troubleshoot any remaining issues. We are sorry for the inconvenience this caused our customers."

Steve McCaskill is TechRadar Pro's resident mobile industry expert, covering all aspects of the UK and global news, from operators to service providers and everything in between. He is a former editor of Silicon UK and journalist with over a decade's experience in the technology industry, writing about technology, in particular, telecoms, mobile and sports tech, sports, video games and media.