Yahoo outages block users worldwide

Outages across the world left many registered Yahoo users without email or instant-messaging capability on Tuesday and Wednesday.

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

While Yahoo's email and messenger services were inaccessible, Yahoo Search, Yahoo News and the Yahoo home pages seem to have been unaffected.

"For a brief period early this morning, certain areas of Yahoo were inaccessible to a portion of registered users due to software-related issues," Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars said in a statement. "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.