DNS - Yahoo Home Page Briefly Goes Blank, Leaves Customers Confused

For any business operating on the Web, a hangup with a server that shuts down the site could be a nightmare, depending upon the main focus of the site. If the site is an eCommerce site, it could mean lost business; if the site is informational, the visitor may just go somewhere else. If the site is Yahoo, the first reaction is likely to be confusion.

According to a recent eWeek report, Yahoo experienced significant problems on Thursday that caused its home page to simply display a plain text message that it was having a Server Hangup. Seems a little hard to believe that Yahoo – one of the three busiest websites in the world – would have such a problem.

Hard to believe or not, one of busiest websites throughout the globe shut down for roughly 40 minutes yesterday, from about 5:30 p.m. to 6:10 p.m. ET. No specific reason has yet been shared for the outage.

It appeared at the time of the problem that it was truly only affecting the site’s home page with a message in the browser. Other popular Yahoo features, such as Yahoo Mail, Calendar, Sports, News and Finance, appeared to be working just fine and not affected at all by the outage.

A Yahoo staffer shared a tweet that included a somewhat wry comment: "As some of you noticed, Yahoo.com was down for a bit this afternoon. We're back up and running—sorry for the interruption!"

Even still, the downtime caught the attention of many as people on sites such as Mashable and SearchEngineLand commented on the outage, drawing even more attention. When all was calm once again, Yahoo had a prepared statement.

"For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconveniences, and we apologize to our users who might have been affected," Yahoo officials said via e-mail.

A few users reported unusual activity on their site when it first became available. For instance, some users reported that the local news they normally viewed on their home page was from another city instead of their own. In addition, the usual rotation of 32 top news stories was whittled down to four.

Yahoo still has not shared the reason for the outage and if users should anticipate it could happen again. It’s likely this little misstep won’t hurt Yahoo much in overall share, although a repeat performance could be another story.