AOL and Yahoo mail appear to be down for US users – get updates live

It looks like both AOL and Yahoo are suffering from an outage affecting their email services, as users have flocked online to report to Downdetector that they can’t send, receive or indeed access their emails.

“We understand some users are currently experiencing difficulties accessing their accounts. We are actively investigating this issue and will provide updates as soon as more information becomes available. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may,” AOL’s customer service has posted on X.

Let’s dig into this as it develops…

AOL took to X to post that it’s experiencing outage problems with it email service.

Yahoo has basically said the same as AOL on X: “We understand some users are currently experiencing difficulties accessing their accounts. We are actively investigating this issue and will provide updates as soon as more information becomes available. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

It’s seems to be a day for outages as over in the UK, network provider EE is also suffering an outage, which also appears to be ongoing.

Looking at the Downdetector report for AOL, it seems to be specifically affecting the email side of its services.

“I’m in Alabama. I can log in and it show’s I have email but the messages says there was an error fetching the items in the list. I used MS Outlook and am getting a sync error for my AOL account. This SUCKS! I sell Real Estate and this is one of the WORST things that could happen!!!” said one user on Donwdetector.

It seems to me that this outage has been going on for AOL from around 10am ET.

And there have been growing reports on Downdetector, which would indicate this issue is becoming widespread in the US.

In the UK there was a spike of AOL outage reports, again pertaining to emails but the outage seems a lot smaller; that could be down to fewer UK users than in the US.

The same could be said for Yahoo Mail in the UK, though it seems to me that on the Downdetector page, reports of problems could be abating.

As one might expect, there’s not a lot of friendly sentiment for Yahoo on X, with one user noting: “Yahoo email is so unreliable. Time to find something better, and that shouldn’t be too hard.”

Equally, and a little like me, some people have expressed wry bemusement that people are still using Yahoo email…

There’s a little bit of inconsistency in how the outage seems to be affecting Yahoo Mail users, with some saying they can log into their email but aren’t getting any messages, while others are noting they can’t aces any of their emails, with error messages being thrown up.

Things aren’t exactly rosy for AOL either, with responses to the company’s X account noting the outage is somewhat widespread in the States and affecting different devices.

This user isn’t happy…

So why are AOL and Yahoo both suffering an outage? Well they merged into one company so are almost certainly sharing infrastructure, meaning an outage for one brand is likely to affect the other.

With so many email clients and services one might think an AOL/Yahoo outage could be glossed over a little but as one Downdetector poster notes: “RIP. Can’t retrieve MFA codes.”

So if you’re using such an email service to handle multi-factor authentication then you might be a little stuck.

Still nothing new from Yahoo or AOL on how long this outage will last or what’s caused it.

I can’t see any outages for cloud platform providers that could be affecting email service servers and supporting infrastructure, so I’m a little limited on how much I can speculate as to the cause of this email outage.

Interestingly, the sign-up page for AOL email still appears to be active…

I kind of feel sorry for small businesses when these forms of email outages occur, as they probably lack the resources and backup systems to mitigate for such outages.

So if you look at this image, you can see it’s not a good look for AOL’s email in Downdetector, but perhaps the number of outage reports have peaked…

It’s understandably a similar situation for Yahoo on Downdetector, as you can see below…