A Glitch in Yahoo's Fine Day by Elisa Batista 1:00 p.m. Jul. 12, 2000 PDT

Yahoo's free email service was finally restored Wednesday afternoon after a two-day failure which, according to a Yahoo spokesman, was not the company's fault

"We've spoken with some users and also investigated Yahoo mail and it appears to be functioning normally," the Yahoo spokesman said after service was restored.

The company is currently working on the problem with "those individual ISPs," and assured no messages would be lost.

The spokesman said a "small number of users" were affected by the glitch that allows people to log in, but not receive any messages. The company would not say how many email subscribers it has but in June, 4.4 billion messages were sent via its free email and instant messaging service.

Complaints by some Yahoo email users have not been a setback to the company's recent strong market showing. On Tuesday, Yahoo (YHOO) shares were up by more than $15 to $121.75 in after-hours trading.

On Wednesday afternoon, the stock inched up to $123.50.

Still, for some irked Yahoo email users, a courtesy email reply would be appropriate.

Katie McCann, a Chicago computer programmer who receives about 50 messages a day on her Yahoo email account, said she has yet to receive a response from the company as to why she hasn't had email in over a day.

She said she emailed her Yahoo account from her Hotmail account and the message bounced back with an email explaining that her user name did not exist.

"I have no idea when it will be back," she said. "I understand that they can have problems sometimes but I wish they could post something on the site."

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,37543,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 12, 2000