Monday May 07 10:00 PM EDT

Blackout dims Yahoo services

By Evan Hansen;Gwendolyn Mariano CNET News.com

Yahoo blamed a power outage in California for disruption in some of its services Monday, including Yahoo Messenger.

Yahoo said its servers, which are hosted by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Exodus Communications, were hit by the outage. That in turn affected Yahoo's personalized services, including instant messenger.

Exodus could not immediately be reached for comment.

Yahoo did not indicate when the system problems started. Some customers began to complain by early afternoon of interruptions, which were ongoing as this report was published.

"One of Yahoo's service providers was affected by the power outages California is experiencing today which consequently affected the accessibility of a few Yahoo services, including Yahoo Messenger," said Shannon Stubo, a Yahoo spokeswoman. "They are working to quickly remedy the situation and hope to have it resolved shortly."

California has been suffering from power shortages since early this year, leading power regulators in the state to call for conservation and institute rolling blackouts. Tight electricity supplies and high demand led to two days of rolling blackouts Jan. 17 and 18 in Northern California and statewide blackouts March 19 and 20.

The California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the keeper of the state's power grid, implemented a Stage 1 emergency notice at 8:04 a.m., indicating that demand was likely to outstrip supply. The emergency was upgraded to Stage 3, the highest level, at 5:01 p.m.

The crisis was set off after a day of high temperatures across the state, and with several power plants offline for pre-summer maintanence.

Outages affecting Internet service have not been limited to California. AOL Time Warner's America Online in April blamed a brief service interruption on a power outage affecting Northern Virginia.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/cn/20010507/tc/blackout_dims_yahoo_services_1.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 07, 2001

Answers

9 p.m. MDT I still cannot get into discussion boards over there.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), May 07, 2001.