Yahoo restores email access to most users, starts updating inboxes with backlog

Yahoo Inc's email service has been unavailable to some users since Monday night due to a "hardware problem" that the Internet company said has been harder to fix than it expected.

Yahoo believes the problem will be fixed by 3 p.m. PST Wednesday, according to a post on Yahoo's official Tumblr blog by the company's senior vice president of communications, Jeffrey Bonforte.

(Update: Yahoo communicated at 5 p.m. PST that most users should be able to access their Yahoo Mail accounts via the web, and official apps for Android, iOS and Windows 8. According to Yahoo, inboxes were still in the process of being brought up to date, with a large backlog. Yahoo also acknowledged some other issues still remained for some users. Restoration of IMAP and POP access services were also in process.)

Bonforte did not specify how many users were affected by the email outage, which he said began at 10:27 p.m. PST on Monday. He said the company has "dozens of people working around the clock" to resolve the problem.

"The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected," Bonforte said.

Yahoo Mail is the most popular Web-based email product among desktop computer users in the United States, according to analytics firm comScore. Yahoo Mail ranks second worldwide, behind Google's Gmail and ahead of Microsoft Corp's Outlook.com.

A redesigned version of Yahoo Mail, which the company introduced in October, has met with a mixed reaction by users. Many users have griped that the new version eliminated popular features such as "tabs."

(Also see: Yahoo completely redesigns Mail for web, mobile and Windows 8)

© Thomson Reuters 2013