An unknown number of Yahoo! Mail users have been have been hit by a service outage since November 25, in what is yet another spectacular PR disaster for Marissa Mayer’s company. Dozens of users report that they haven’t been able to send or receive emails, while others claim they cannot login to the service at all.

Now obviously, being unable to access your email is a critical issue that needs to be resolved quickly, so we can assume that Yahoo is working feverishly behind the scenes to do about this, right?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Although the outage started in November, Yahoo only acknowledged the issue on December 5, tweeting:

“A small % of our users are seeing intermittent delays receiving emails & accessing archived emails. We’re working to resolve ASAP.”

Sadly the issue still hasn’t been resolved even now.  On December 11, Yahoo once again admitted that some users are experiencing some problems, and again stated that it’s working on a fix, with normal service expected to be restored in a few hours. But lo and behold, even today, numerous users are reporting that they’re unable to access their Yahoo Mail accounts, or have yet to receive messages sent from previous days.

In a Yahoo Mail Blog post, the company stated that the outage was due to “a hardware problem in one of our mail data centers. The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected.”

Users are getting frustrated with Yahoo Mail and rightly so. Its help desk offers scant information that can actually assist users, while queries from the press are being ignored by the company.

Further digging points to the recent revamp of Yahoo Mail as the probable cause of the problem. Since the new-look Yahoo Mail was unveiled on October 8, there have been reports of missing emails in folders. In one case, a user reported that a support request regarding this issue was marked COMPLETED, even though the issue wasn’t resolved.

These aren’t the only complaints about the new Yahoo Mail either. The missing tabs feature is one of the biggest complaints, while many aren’t happy with the new look, especially when emails go missing, or they can’t even use the service.

So is this just a simple hardware problem, as Yahoo claims, or has Yahoo been hacked again? This year hasn’t been kind to Yahoo Mail – as we’ve previously covered on SiliconANGLE, the service been plagued with reports of accounts being hacked in March, April and May. Thousands of accounts were compromised during these months, leaving many users unable to access their emails because the password were changed.

In October, Yahoo finally added default SSL encryption to protect user’s data, but the move may have been too late. Could the changes Yahoo implemented last October be what’s causing all these trouble? Were they breached? Yahoo isn’t really talking, so we’ll just have to wait for its official statement, if it does give one.

If you’re tired of Yahoo, there are more reliable email services out there.  If you’re interested in finally dumping Yahoo, check out our post on How to Switch Email Services Easily & Keep All Your Mails, Contacts.

Surprisingly, even if Yahoo Mail sucks,  Jeff Bonforte, the person in charge of it, believes that its clients won’t abandon the service. He stated that the only way people will leave is if Yahoo kicked Mail users in the [testicles]. Confidence is a good thing, but if Yahoo Mail doesn’t clear up its act soon, Bonforte could well end up looking rather dumb.