Many users of Yahoo Mail are encountering cryptic error messages and aren't able to receive or send emails, and these problems appear to have been occuring for several days.

The most common error codes being reported by frustrated users of Yahoo's email service are 1, 14 and 17, which apparently show up without any explanatory text. Users complain that they are receiving these error codes whenever they try to open their inboxes or send emails, and that these persistent errors are making the service unusable.

Complaints have surfaced on Fluther.com and on Twitter.

A Yahoo spokesperson told Wired on Monday afternoon, 'A small fraction of Yahoo Mail users may have experienced intermittent email issues earlier today. We believe this is an isolated incident and are quickly working to resolve the issue.'

However, many reports of Yahoo Mail errors 14 and 17 have appeared on the company's Yahoo Answers forum over the past weeks, so the problems - whatever might be causing them don't appear to have arisen suddenly just yesterday.

These problems aren't confined to just Yahoo's free email users in North America, either. Some users of the giant internet portal's fee-based premium email services have also reported encountering the errors, and at least one user in Brazil has reported problems.

Only some users seem to be affected, though. Many other users have reported that they aren't facing any problem.

Yahoo Mail boasts more than 250 million users, making it one of the largest email service providers on the internet.

Massive web-based email and cloud computing services are vulnerable to these sorts of outages. The numbers of users involved are so large that banks of servers in many data centres in different geographic locations are required to serve them all.

That equipment failures and software glitches will inevitably occur eventually is a virtual statistical certainty, especially because maintenance must occasionally be done, growing workloads require constant balancing, human beings sometimes make mistakes, and so on.

It might be quite a while before the largest internet-enabled remote services providers like Yahoo (and Google, Microsoft, IBM and others) will be able to design and build out solid infrastructures with the necessary levels of redundancy and flexibility to be able to absolutely guarantee uninterrupted cloud computing services to millions of subscribers. X

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