Is Yahoo, AOL down? Thousands reported issues accessing services, mail

Yahoo and AOL outages briefly caused issues for thousands of users trying to access the web portals' services on Jan. 21.

Yahoo said in a statement to USA TODAY that the outage occurred after the company, which recently sold AOL, rolled out "a change to our traffic management system."

"After reverting the change, Yahoo services have fully recovered with the impact lasting less than an hour," the statement said.

Both Yahoo and AOL Customer Care said in statements on X that they were "aware that some users may be experiencing issues accessing" their services around 10 a.m. ET.

"Our teams are actively investigating, and updates will be provided as more information becomes available," the identical statements said.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, reports of issues with both AOL and Yahoo began spiking shortly after 9 a.m. ET. Roughly 17,000 users were impacted by the Yahoo outage by 10 a.m. ET, while about 7,000 AOL users reported issues by the same time.

People on social media reported seeing an error message reading "edge: too many requests" when trying to access the platforms.

By 11 a.m. ET, reports for issues with both platforms had dropped significantly.

Yahoo and AOL's portfolios of services includes their search engine, mail and news platforms, among others. The platforms were both owned by Yahoo until the Italian tech company Bending Spoons acquired AOL from Yahoo late last year.

USA TODAY has reached out to AOL.

This story has been updated with additional information.