Consumer perception of Yahoo has tumbled following a widely reported email outage that left some users unable to access their emails and left the company’s CEO promising “we will do better in future.” Despite a decline in BrandIndex Buzz score for Yahoo, Americans appear to be satisfied with the brand, as Quality and Satisfaction metrics were unaffected by the glitch.
The glitch took hold last week, and left around 1 in 100 Yahoo users with trouble accessing their accounts. Just a few days later Flickr – Yahoo’s photo-sharing platform – also crashed for around ten minutes in an unrelated outage.
Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer described the glitch, which left some users with undelivered emails for a period of several days, as “unacceptable” and said “it’s something we’re taking very seriously.” Explaining why the outage took several days to resolve, Mayer said it “was much more complex than it seemed at first.”
Yahoo said the outage affected around 1% of its users, and first took hold on Monday December 9 caused by a hardware failure in one of the company’s storage systems.
“The problem was a particularly rare one,” Mayer added, explaining that “some of the affected users were unable to access their accounts, instead seeing an outdated ‘scheduled maintenance’ page which was a confusing and incorrect message.”
“While our overall uptime is well above 99.9%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week,” Mayer posted on the Yahoo Tumblr page.
An update from Yahoo on December 16 said that 75% of emails delivered between November 25 and December 9 had been restored, and told users: ‘we are sorry for the frustration this has caused and thank you for your continued patience as we bring affected accounts up to date.’
Buzz for Yahoo on December was at 16, and has since fallen down to 6, out of a possible -100 to +100 score range calculated by asking Americans: ‘Have you heard anything positive or negative about Yahoo, either through news, advertising, or by word of mouth?’ So far in 2013, Yahoo has had a positive year in terms of perception. Its ’30 Days of Change’ campaign – in which the brand released a new logo every day for a month – saw an uptick in scores, while recent announcements like a digital news revamp and introduction of Katie Couric as “the face of Yahoo news” have kept brand perception high.
Buzz remains above June 2013 levels, when a perception decline coincided with reports that the NSA had been secretly accessing user data from the data centers of tech companies, including Yahoo, without their knowledge. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer announced shortly after the revelations that the company would be adding extra security levels to its business operation.
Positively for Yahoo, perception metrics of Quality and Customer Satisfaction appear to be little affected by the outage. To work out the -100 to 100 Quality and Satisfaction scores, BrandIndex asked a nationally-representative panel of Americans: ‘Does Yahoo represent good quality or bad quality?’ and ‘Are you a dissatisfied customer of Yahoo, or a satisfied customer?’ Since the outage itself affected so few customers, it’s not surprising that the majority of responses remained positive during this period. While Satisfaction scores actually rose from 24 on December 9 to 34 on December 16.
This post was written by Ted Marzilli. He is senior vice president and managing director of BrandIndex.
Image: Getty
