Yahoo goes down for almost an hour, reason unknown

Users of Yahoo were unable to use the search engine this afternoon for the better part of an hour, and received the error message “server hangup” during most of the outage.

Yahoo-related services like Yahoo Mail and Messenger were seemingly unaffected by the “server hangup.” Reasons behind the downtime are not known, and Yahoo has not commented on why the services were briefly unavailable. eWeek obtained an email statement from Yahoo spokeswoman Kryssa Guntrum:

Yahoo was quick to respond — albeit by prepared statement — to the query from eWEEK.

“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 inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected,” Guntrum said via email.

When the service returned, eWeek reports that the main page’s news stories were slimmed down from the average 32 pieces to four.