Yahoo closes Geocities, users having downtime problems

Yahoo has just closed the ailing Geocities site, after years in the wilderness. Although Yahoo has said that this won’t affect users, it’s looking like there are already some problems.

Some users can’t access accounts, and Yahoo’s own help channel indicates they’re experiencing a lot of contacts asking for help. What everyone really needs, of course, is a business email that doesn’t work. The problems aren’t intentional, obviously, but closing down Geocities will have affected a lot of people who signed up originally with the site. That would be a reasonable percentage of Yahoo users. I, for one, have been having some problems. I sent a contact, and instantly got the US AT&T help line, which, naturally, doesn’t help those of us with Australian zip codes and phone numbers. It can’t be a coincidence that these problems started within an hour of Geocities closing. Yahoo mail was fine this morning. The probability is that Yahoo’s IDs weren’t transferred over to the new system, and that will take a while to sort out. Could wish this had been properly sorted out, however, before pulling the plug. The possibility of creating problems for a lot of business email accounts are staggering. If Yahoo’s trying to start a stampede to other email services, this’d be how to do it. While the obvious ramifications of dropping Geocities are no mystery, it’s open to debate how much sympathy is deserved for dropping the ball like this. I’ve received so far two auto responses, neither of which was much use. You’d think AT&T and Yahoo might have seen the problems coming for their millions of international users. The irony is that a lot of users have stayed loyal to Yahoo, despite many new products coming online. As a PR exercise, this leaves a lot to be desired. We can hope that this will sort itself out ASAP as it should, and this is only downtime. If not, we’re heading into lawsuit territory. Update: OK, now the good news: Yahoo started behaving normally after about an hour. If you're having problems with this, try the contacts, but allow time for them to sort out the issues. Obviously this isn't a major deal, but if you're experiencing problems, it's worth contacting.