Oh, Yahoo. The lumbering Silicon Valley giant can’t seem to get out of its way. This afternoon, after Gmail experienced worldwide outages for a brief period of time, Yahoo joined several brands in using it as a real-time marketing opportunity. “Gmail is temporarily unavailable,” Yahoo tweeted with a photo of the Gmail error page.
This was cheeky, not in the least because Yahoo’s email service has suffered outages and hiccups far more severe than Google’s. Realizing the glass-houses problem, Yahoo took to its account to abjectly apologize.
Naturally, this backfired, as Twitter launched a lobby of scorn on Yahoo for distancing itself from the original tweet, which was actually rather amusing. Some of the more pointed reactions: