At four in the morning, I had a bad dream and woke up.
So I decided to distract myself by checking my email.
Only to find out that the nightmare was my email account. Totally wiped out. Fifteen years of correspondence erased. No more folders. As clean as virgin snow.
I am all in favor of starting afresh, wiping the slate as it were. But this clean slate meant the loss of two novels in progress, all my students' work, hundreds of photos, my bank information, and my professional files over a decade.
So I decided to contact Yahoo, and get things restored right away. No problem, I thought. The same thing happened to me five years ago in Turkey and--after a strenuous hour searching for their contact information--I did get a technician on the phone who patiently took care of it, step by step, and restored everything by morning.
That was five years ago.
Now no matter how hard I searched on the Yahoo helpline, I could not find any possible way to get a live Yahoo contact. There were titillating promises--"Yahoo customer support may come via email..."--and even the tantalizing word "chat" mentioned in one link. But no chat line resulted, let alone an email to write to or phone number. I could only fill out an automated form requesting "restoration": a form that bore the gloomy caveat that "restorations aren't always successful."
That was it.
Then I found a website devoted to Yahoo user complaints: Downdetector.
With 33,500 complaints identical mine posted in the last 24 hours! Thousands and thousands of people all over the world--from Greece to Mexico-- have lost their life (email) savings overnight.
And counting.
One person lost all their contracts for their house sale. A business CEO lost 15 years of his client records. Another woman, her life contacts.
Every minute, someone new is writing in distress. The most frequent outcry: why isn't Yahoo responding to this?
This afternoon: a glimmer of hope. Yahoo sent a Tweet saying that some users are experiencing "Yahoo Mail issues," and engineers were working on it. But, as the forum chatters noted, it was not specified whether the "issues" referred to is the email wipe-out.
It all has a Kafkaesque feel.
More than a few chatters have clamored for someone connected with media to post something--to give the situation a voice. Hence this blog.
Normally, I am scrupulous about getting both sides of the story before posting. But I cannot even get the other side of the story! No way to reach Yahoo.
Could Yahoo please respond here?