Looks like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer may make Santa’s “nice” list after all.
After angering scores of small-business customers by shutting down their websites and corresponding emails over Thanksgiving weekend, Yahoo has reversed course and is reactivating all expired sites, it announced on Thursday.
The move has saved Yahoo! from losing some customers who were planning to jump ship. Commercial real estate broker Rob Lewerenz said that he will give Yahoo! a second chance due largely to the helpful customer service employee who called him following The Post’s story about the fiasco.
Professional Santa Claus Charles Jennings, however, still wants to give Mayer a lump of coal in her stocking.
Jennings’ site, Youbetterbegood.net, is up and running now, but the outage, which started on Black Friday, has already cost him business, he said.
“I’m still not happy about it and still not impressed,” he said. “It’s too little too late for me,” he said, adding that he plans to go to Godaddy.com after the busy Christmas season is over.
The mass reactivation, which is being rolled out over several days, will give Yahoo!’s customers another 30 days— until Jan. 19 — to fill out forms required to keep their websites and corresponding emails alive.
Yahoo!’s loyal customers suffered mass outages on Thanskgiving weekend as Yahoo! moved to unwind its small business unit from a decade-plus old deal with AT&T.
Business owners were told by Yahoo! to accept new terms of service and privacy policy by Nov. 22, or risk seeing their accounts canceled.
But as The Post reported last week, customers have protested, saying they weren’t sufficiently warned of the impending outage. Some users said, for example, that Yahoo! sent the new terms of service agreement to old email addresses.
“It does sound like progress,” said businessman Everett Frank, who was affected by the blackout, of Yahoo!’s move to reactive the website for another 30 days.
Frank said he is still waiting for his email to return to life.