Yahoo and AOL mail suffered hours of outage – here's how it played out

AOL took to X to post that it's experiencing outage problems with it email service.

Yahoo has basically said the same as AOL on X: "We understand some users are currently experiencing difficulties accessing their accounts. We are actively investigating this issue and will provide updates as soon as more information becomes available. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

It's seems to be a day for outages as over in the UK, network provider EE is also suffering an outage, which also appears to be ongoing.

Looking at the Downdetector report for AOL, it seems to be specifically affecting the email side of its services.

"I'm in Alabama. I can log in and it show's I have email but the messages says there was an error fetching the items in the list. I used MS Outlook and am getting a sync error for my AOL account. This SUCKS! I sell Real Estate and this is one of the WORST things that could happen!!!" said one user on Donwdetector.

It seems to me that this outage has been going on for AOL from around 10am ET.

And there have been growing reports on Downdetector, which would indicate this issue is becoming widespread in the US.

In the UK there was a spike of AOL outage reports, again pertaining to emails but the outage seems a lot smaller; that could be down to fewer UK users than in the US.

The same could be said for Yahoo Mail in the UK, though it seems to me that on the Downdetector page, reports of problems could be abating.

As one might expect, there's not a lot of friendly sentiment for Yahoo on X, with one user noting: "Yahoo email is so unreliable. Time to find something better, and that shouldn't be too hard."

Equally, and a little like me, some people have expressed wry bemusement that people are still using Yahoo email...

There's a little bit of inconsistency in how the outage seems to be affecting Yahoo Mail users, with some saying they can log into their email but aren't getting any messages, while others are noting they can't aces any of their emails, with error messages being thrown up.

Things aren't exactly rosy for AOL either, with responses to the company's X account noting the outage is somewhat widespread in the States and affecting different devices.

This user isn't happy...

So why are AOL and Yahoo both suffering an outage? Well they merged into one company so are almost certainly sharing infrastructure, meaning an outage for one brand is likely to affect the other.

With so many email clients and services one might think an AOL/Yahoo outage could be glossed over a little but as one Downdetector poster notes: "RIP. Can't retrieve MFA codes."

So if you're using such an email service to handle multi-factor authentication then you might be a little stuck.

Still nothing new from Yahoo or AOL on how long this outage will last or what's caused it.

I can't see any outages for cloud platform providers that could be affecting email service servers and supporting infrastructure, so I'm a little limited on how much I can speculate as to the cause of this email outage.

Interestingly, the sign-up page for AOL email still appears to be active...

I kind of feel sorry for small businesses when these forms of email outages occur, as they probably lack the resources and backup systems to mitigate for such outages.

So if you look at this image, you can see it's not a good look for AOL's email in Downdetector, but perhaps the number of outage reports have peaked...

It's understandably a similar situation for Yahoo on Downdetector, as you can see below...

No hint of when a fix will be made for Yahoo. And I feel this X user's frustration...

AOL is being equally quiet...

But oddly it seems like AOL email is working on iPhone for some users.

Totally get this could be a big ol' issue for Yahoo email users too:

I'm a Microsoft and Gmail email user so tend to have backups for certain important authentication services. But it's not a fool proof method, especially if you can't use a backup or secondary email.

If I couldn't get a bank code due to an email outage, I'd be rather upset... I'm not the most patient of people.

AOL's main website, including its search and news functions are all operating fine, so this does appear to be an outage exclusively linked to email services.

Hmmm I'm seeing some murmurings that AOL email could slowly be coming back with Downdetector user MelissaW noting "It looks like it works, but will not delete email or let you look in folders. Gives an error message."

Certainly doesn't look look like the email issue is fixed, but sporadic returns of service may be an indicator that AOL is trying out fixes.

A scathing comment about AOL by one Stephen Jackson on Downdetector: "AOL too busy bombarding us with their ever switching non-stop spam, instead of focusing on making sure their email works."

On the Yahoo Downdetector page it looks like some of the service is coming back with one RL Ross noting: "It seems to be coming back up - just got my emails from this morning, finally."

"Mine just came back," said Downdetector user Pamela. So things are looking up.

This message still remains at the top of AOL's Help page: "We are aware some users are experiencing issues accessing their AOL Mail, or displaying their mailbox. We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience as our engineers work to remedy this concern."

Looks like AOL email could be back up in South Florida, New York City, Langhorne, Washington, Los Angeles and North Carolina, according to a clutch of Downdetector users.

We got an email from a reader called Barbara Callahan who said the following: "I have been following you about AOL outage. Thank you for ALL the updates am on Long Island NY and mine seems to be up and working now."

So it looks like all is slowly getting well with Yahoo and AOL's email services. Expect a few hiccups or perhaps some lost emails or ones stuck in drafts.

"The outage today ate some emails. I have a gap of about 3-4 hours of emails that I never received that I know were sent. Yikes." said a Downdetector user on the Yahoo page.

With AOL some users are suggesting a restart of the app, and that's something I'd recommend after an outage, so consider it a good tip.

While it doesn't look like a every Yahoo and AOL email user has got a fully functional instance of the services, it would appear that whatever has been done to fix the outage is spreading across that States.

There are a good few users of both email services reporting that they are missing emails that they expected across the some four hours of service outage.

"My Yahoo mail is back but it looks like about four hours of missing messages? Will Yahoo restore those? I hope so." said Downdetector user 'leemortimer'.

In regards to AOL, Downdetector user Jana noted: "The mail is back up in NJ but I am missing all the messages sent from 10:30am-2:15pm."

While AOL has yet to remove the outage message from its Help page, and neither it or Yahoo have posted on X to follow up on their previous posts noting their respective email services were experiencing issues, going by Downdetector and user reports, it would seem like both email services are mostly back up and running.

There are plenty of reports of missing email, which is to be expected in such an outage, and it's not clear if Yahoo/AOL will be able to retrieve them.

But I'm closing off this live blog for now, as I consider the incident to be over. I just hope you weren't hugely affected by this, but if so do check out our roundup of the best email services if you fancy a switch from AOL or Yahoo.