Yahoo site hits rocky stretch
- — 08 February, 2000 18:02
The site had intermittent outage problems during the morning and afternoon, during which http://www.yahoo.com was inaccessible.
"What we saw, essentially, was that somewhere between 10:15 and 10:30, the Website stopped responding," said Daniel Todd, director of public service at Keynote Systems. "We still don't know for sure if that was a problem with the Web server, their connection to the Internet or something else."
A Yahoo representative confirmed that the site, which is a conglomeration of search, auction, shopping, and news features to name a few services, was out for almost three hours but is "pretty much back up" and was running at 1:30pm local time. However, there is no mention of the outage nor the reasons behind it posted on the Website, and Yahoo has not yet given an explanation for the site crash.
According to Todd, Yahoo usually has a very high availability rating, usually above 95 per cent, which means "95 per cent of the time when you go to that Website to look once, you get the page the very first time you try to load." As the site has come back online, availability has been slowly improving.
"Starting at around 1:25pm or so, the Website again began responding to requests, so you were then able to get through again," Todd added. "However, since it has come back, their success rate is around 70 per cent or so, but (between 2:30 and 2:45pm), it has been closer to 90 per cent."
Keynote Systems will continue to monitor Yahoo's site until it is back to its usual performance and running smoothly.
Last month, Yahoo touted an audience increase to 120 million unique users in December, doubling December 1998's mark of 60 million, as well as a registered base of 100 million users by the end of 1999. The company also has a 2-for-1 stock split scheduled for February 14, 2000.
