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UPDATE5 Sky Broadband and BT ISP Customers Hit by Email Problems

Thursday, Nov 20th, 2014 (1:31 pm) - Score 12,779

Customers of Sky Broadband (BSkyB) and BT are currently experiencing problems with accessing their emails on the operators Yahoo! Mail powered platform, which appears to be preventing many users from successfully logging-in.

Officially Sky first recognised the problem at 9:20am today with a canned statement: “We’re aware of an issue with Sky Yahoo Mail which is causing problems if you’re trying to log in to your mailbox. We’re working closely with Yahoo to fix the problem and we’ll provide an update on our progress in the next hour. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.” A progress update posted roughly three hours later said, “Engineers are continuing to work towards a resolution“.

Some of Sky’s customers have noted, via the operators Community Forum, that their issues actually began early yesterday morning and have continued into today, while others say it started today. Customers who experience the somewhat sporadic issue typically find that their login attempts are rejected, often with a request to re-enter the password.

However the problem does not appear to manifest in exactly the same way for everybody. For example, Sky users that have setup their email via the Mail app on iPhone / iPad (iOS) devices may be able to access incomplete messages and emails will only download very slowly.

The good news is that some customers have found a temporary solution, although it might not work for everybody. Never the less a few subscribers were able to get into their emails by going directly to the Yahoo! UK email sign-in page and then entering their full email address and password, as opposed to using Sky’s own interface / system. But take note that Yahoo!’s servers may also be the source of this issue as they too have recently been having some difficulties.

Sky Broadband officially migrated from their old Google (Gmail) based email platform to a new Yahoo! webmail alternative (Sky Yahoo! Mail) last year, which caused more than a few problems and created some unhappy customers (here). In fairness, mass email platform migrations rarely go smoothly.

UPDATE 1:43pm

Interestingly BT’s older Yahoo! based email customers are also having problems. One of BT’s twitter agents said, “Sorry if you are unable to login, or send and receive email with BT Yahoo today. We’re aware and are working to fix asap.” More discussion can be found on BT’s community forum.

Readers might recall that BT have this year been busy migrating their old Yahoo! platform to the new Openwave Messaging (formerly Critical Path) based service, albeit with a few teething problems like Sky.

UPDATE 2:04pm

Upon closer inspect it looks like some of the reports began as early as Tuesday 18th November, which is when a similar issue struck Yahoo!’s own mail platform. But this was allegedly resolved on the same day, with the firm saying, “Access has been restored for most users. We’re continuing to work to resolve issues for all users. Thank you for your patience.” Clearly the problem has not been fully resolve and is now hitting users of Yahoo! based platforms in the United Kingdom.

UPDATE 3pm

The latest update from Sky states that “a temporary fix has been put in place but you may experience a longer than normal load time when trying to sign in.”

UPDATE 21st Nov 2014

Both BT and Sky customers are still suffering from problems. An update from Sky reveals why, “The problem has been caused by a cut in transatlantic fibre cables by a third party. Engineers are travelling to the site to fix the problem and will carry out repairs over the weekend. We don’t yet have confirmation on when a permanent fix will be in place but we’ll provide further updates as soon as we can.” It’s unclear why Sky and BT can’t divert around this fault.

UPDATE 25th Nov 2014

A status update issued by one of Sky’s community managers late last night reported that the problem has now been solved and we’ve seen a drop off in complaints, although some people still appear to be having some issues with slow email (this might just be due to the strain as the servers slowly catch up with a backlog of messages).

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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