Is There a Relationship Between TalkTalk and Yahoo?

[Muddymedic]

Good afternoon  Some (perhaps many) of us may be aware that Yahoo Mail (including Sky and I think AOL) has been down for several hours earlier today, although it now seems to be up and running again.

This  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49596820

is a link to a BBC News Item posted a little time ago regarding this outage, and it strongly suggests that Yahoo 'powers' (inter alia)TalkTalk email accounts.  Is that accurate?  Could this outage have affected (even more than usual) Pipex legacy email connectivity, since both POP and Webmail access has been - and continues to be -  almost unusable (at least by me) all day?

Thanks

Regards 

[Muddymedic]

BUMP! Sorry, didn't pick up on the Service Status posting on this, but I wonder why  the BBC thinks there is a link?  OCEs please ignore my posting on this, unless you know otherwise. 

[stevesurrey]

I would be interested to know too as several different news outlets are reporting a connection. eg "In the UK, the problem also affected BT, Sky and TalkTalk's email accounts, which are powered by the US brand's service."

Be ironic if there is a link given the difficulties we Pipex email users had sending messages to Yahoo addresses for several weeks recently.

[GEG63]

From earlier queries in posts I know that Oath (which is branch of Verizon) manage Yahoo, Sky, AOL and BT mail. But I hadn't heard of them having anything to do with mail on TalkTalk.

Again from earlier posts I know Yahoo supply a news service to TalkTalk - perhaps that's what has been affected and the BBC have got their wires crossed.

Perhaps an OCE could clarify?

[StephenF]

Hey, 

Thanks for the question, I can however confirm that TalkTalk mail is not provided by or hosted by Yahoo. I think the confusion came from our trying to be helpful in so much that we put out a message advising our customers that Yahoo had an outage of their email service and in hindsight i think our wording could have been better to make it crystal clear "Yahoo have an outage, not talktalk and no talktalk services are impacted"

We've done this in the past when facebook, IG, O2 or Voda etc goes down in an attempt to inform customers and save them the need to contact us, thinking their is an issue with our service. 

Thanks 

[Muddymedic]

Hi @StephenF Many thanks for that clarification.  I must say it all seemed a bit unlikely, and it appears that the BBC (and other news outlets) didn't check their facts (surely not?), and then just used each others' copy.

Regards

[StephenF]

No worries, an innocent mistake and a lesson learnt on our part to be super clear, once i learnt of the confusion I changed the messaging on our status page to read:
"We're aware that the Yahoo and AOL email services are currently impacted by an outage which is not related to TalkTalk. Whilst this does not impact your TalkTalk services, if you are a Yahoo/AOL email customer you may experience issues using their service."