Yahoo Mail, one of the world’s longest-standing email services, experienced a widespread outage on Thursday, leaving thousands of users across the globe unable to access their accounts.
The disruption, which began around 4pm, saw a spike in user complaints citing login failures, server errors, and a recurring message titled “Temporary Error 15.”
According to data from outage monitoring site DownDetector, more than 10,000 user reports flooded in within minutes of the incident.
The issue appeared to be global, affecting users in Nigeria, the United States, India, parts of Europe, and beyond.
Many users who attempted to log in were greeted with a message stating, “We are experiencing some technical difficulties. Temporary Error: 15.”
While Yahoo’s system acknowledged the error on its help page, the message offered little comfort, simply stating that such temporary issues “usually correct themselves within a few minutes to a few hours.”
As of press time, there has been no official update or explanation from Yahoo’s parent company.
The outage impacted both personal and business users, with some reporting significant disruption to their workday.
One user, tweeting via the handle @galaxyCat, wrote: “Yahoo! email to run a business is completely destroying my ability to connect with customers when it’s down like it is now. Can’t do a darn thing and there’s no way to get contracts out and back in. Work Day Destroyed.”
Others experienced inconsistencies in access. @jujulexangel tweeted: “Anyone else having issues with Yahoo email? Keep getting error message on laptop while I can open app on phone. Weird! If down you would think it would be both down.”
Yahoo Mail, launched in 1997, remains one of the most-used email services globally, with hundreds of millions of users.
However, it has faced challenges in recent years due to increasing competition from Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook, as well as legacy technical infrastructure.
As frustration mounts, users were continuing to turn to social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to demand answers and updates.
The hashtag #YahooMailDown trended in several countries, highlighting the scale of the problem.
