Yahoo! explains why email system broke down

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Yahoo! email was down for five days this last week, and the Internet company finally told users why.

You can either read this somewhat lengthy explanation by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, or I can explain it to you in three simple words:

They effed up.

Mayer offers an apology and said it was a hardware failure that caused the outage. "We really let you down this week," she concluded.

Yeah, they did. She added that nearly all Yahoo! email accounts that were affected should have been up and running by Friday afternoon.

But hardware and software failures, despite having backups to backups, will happen that cause an outage. Frankly, The Salt Lake Tribune knows this all too well after a breakdown in system that prints the newspapers.

— Vince Horiuchi