Yahoo suffered availability problems that affected its home page as well as some of its other Web sites and services starting Friday at around 5:50 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time and began getting back to normal at around 7:15 a.m. At its worst point, Yahoo.com"s availability dropped to around 60%, meaning that 4 out of 10 visitors couldn"t access the page, according to Dan Berkowitz, senior communications director at Keynote Systems. Keynote"s global network of monitoring computers checks the availability of the world"s most popular sites.
NetCraft also detected the problems, saying in a short note that the intensity of the performance issues varied among geographical areas and also among Yahoo services. "The Yahoo.com home page was inaccessible for several hours from our London monitoring station and responded more slowly than usual from several locations in the U.S. Yahoo Search appears to have experienced lengthier availability problems than the home page and other Yahoo services," NetCraft reported. Services affected included Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News and Flickr.