Yahoo's email service suffered a minor outage last week that affected a "small percentage" of its users beginning at 7:30 a.m. PST on Thursday. Small is a relative term, of course, and in Yahoo's case was eventually revealed to have affected 0.04 percent, or 1 million of its 250 million users. Yahoo! Mail senior product manager Stephanie Shum in a brief blog post emphasized that "No email data was lost or at risk," and noted that Yahoo! has isolated the root sauce of the problem.

The downtime proves once again that no computing system is completely immune to system failure, much less complex, cloud-based applications. A storage software update bug at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) resulted in some Gmail users losing access to their email data just over two months ago. As it is, businesses are well-advised to put the appropriate business continuity and disaster recovery measures in place for critical aspects of their businesses.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PC Magazine
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this post at the Yahoo! blog

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