I have to admit, whenever there’s a news article about Yahoo!, my first thought is “they still exist?”
This week was no different when suddenly they mentioned quietly on a support document that they were closing down Yahoo! Groups – and in fact, shuttering it quite quickly, leaving users of the environment scrambling.
Like so much of what the inept mess that is Yahoo! has done lately, the entire thing is rapidly turning into a complete dumpster fire.
Jason Scott noted:
Yahoo! certainly excels at dumpster fires. They’ve had privacy breaches that would make Equifax blanch, and they’ve regularly become one of those shining examples of What Not To Do In Business.
Likewise, the Yahoo! groups debacle might just serve a lesson to people, not in its utility to so many people since its introduction in 2001 (has anyone told Ofcom?), but in the most important lesson for public Cloud. In fact, in the spirit of Yahoo!, I’ll declare it: The! Most! Important! Lesson! For! Public! Cloud!
If you put something in public Cloud, you’re responsible for protecting the data.
Yahoo! groups is likely to be hit by a tsunami of traffic over the coming weeks as people with the nous work feverishly to retrieve and capture a snapshot of the data that’s there. Who knows how much content will actually be lost?
I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who loses content in Yahoo!’s latest dumpster fire, but I hope if we get nothing else out of it, we put paid to the notion that just because it’s in the Cloud, it’s protected.
Ah, Yahoo Groups a long time ago hosted an unofficial CommVault support forum where the offshore PMs and devs participated. It was useful but a god-awful interface for 2008. I can’t imagine Verizon’s invested much into groups since the purchase.