Yahoo! blackouts hit IM addicts

Some registered Yahoo! users were left without email or instant-messaging capability on Tuesday and Wednesday.

While the company acknowledged an early morning outage on Wednesday, some Yahoo! user reports indicated services were also out on Tuesday night in some areas. There were also complaints of Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball being unavailable.

Joe Beaulaurier, the blogger for 'The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog', said: "I've been encountering problems with logging in to Yahoo! last night and again this morning. Sluggish to get into mail, and I have been unable to log in to Messenger at all this morning." The site also received comments from users complaining that Yahoo! did not immediately post a notice about the outage on its main page.

While Yahoo!'s email and messenger services were inaccessible for some people, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! News and the Yahoo! homepages seem to have been unaffected.

A Yahoo! spokeswoman said in a statement: "For a brief period early this morning, certain areas of Yahoo! were inaccessible to a portion of registered users due to software-related issues. We have identified the issue and corrected it. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience, and we apologise to our users who might have been affected. We take these issues extremely seriously, and Yahoo! is instituting new processes to protect against similar incidents from occurring again."

Yahoo! did not release any details on the percentage of users affected, or what specifically caused the "software-related issues".

On Monday, Yahoo! announced a beta release of its new instant-messaging application with voice. Coincidentally, the beta version was released the same day Microsoft officially launched its own new service, Windows Live Messenger.

Yahoo! Messenger with Voice offers several plug-ins in addition to new communications features. In order for outside users to contribute to the system, Yahoo! has opened its application programming interface for people wishing to develop additional plug-ins.

Candace Lombardi writes for CNET News.com