Yahoo’s Servers May be Having Trouble
Yahoo’s (Nasdaq:YHOO) main page has been down selectively from 8:30pm to 9:40pm today. Other users reported Yahoo.com and Yahoo Publisher Network YPN have been slow throughout the day as well. While this may be nothing, it could possibly be a sign that Yahoo is making changes to its sites. For a company with revenues this large this is significant news. Last year Yahoo had $5.2 billion in revenue if that revenue was truely based on Yahoo’s network of sites being up 10 minutes of being down amounts to about $10,000 in lost revenue. In the wake of news that Google has been making huge capital investments, it may be possibly that Yahoo has been doing the same and today was a necessary step in the process to make things run better in the future.
However the fact that it happened during peek surfing hours suggests it is just as likely that Yahoo has not been keeping up with demand for bandwidth. If this is true the site may see much slower loading time in the future. YPN has thousands of webmasters displaying Yahoo ads on their sights. When these ads load slowly the webmasters are likely to switch to competitive ads, the most popular competitor being Google’s Adsense program.