'Power failure' cuts off Yahoo users

Yahoo has apologised to its users in the UK after many were left without access to mail, instant messaging and search facilities over part of the weekend.

Some Yahoo-related forums carried complaints as far back as Saturday, but a spokesperson for the Web giant told ZDNet UK on Monday that "a number of our services in the UK were available intermittently on Sunday (23 July) as a result of a power failure in the afternoon".

The spokesperson claimed that the services, including some of Yahoo's content services, were "quickly restored to normal operation," and added that the "remaining services are returning to normal now".

Yahoo suffered a similar outage a month ago, leading the company to blame "software-related issues", while rival webmail provider Google briefly cut off thousands of users in May.