If there’s one person you don’t want to mess with this time of year — it’s Santa.
But that is exactly what Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has done.
Among the scores of small business owners across the country whose websites have gone dark recently as the Web portal moves to unwind itself from a 10-year-old Yahoo! Small Business deal with AT&T is one run by Charles Jennings of San Francisco — a professional Santa.
“I could not imagine a worse time of year this could happen,” said Jennings, who operates a tour boat in the warmer months but relies on his Santa gigs for money when the weather outside turns frightful.
“I have begged Yahoo! as Charles Jennings and as Santa Claus to fix this,” Jennings said, as his YouBetterBeGood.net site remains dark as coal.
“I have lost lots of jobs and also there are lots of kids that didn’t get to see Santa Claus this year,” he said of the two-week outage of his Yahoo!-hosted site.
Jennings, who has worked as St. Nick for MLB’s Oakland Athletics, said his site went dark on Black Friday. He and scores of other small business owners are fuming at Mayer and her tech team’s ham-fisted approach to its unwinding of the program with AT&T.
The nightmare before Christmas began when the business owners were told by Yahoo! to accept new terms of service and privacy policy by Nov. 22. Those who didn’t accept the new terms would see their accounts canceled.
But the business owners claim Yahoo! didn’t do enough to make it clear that their accounts would be de-activated.
The nightmare continued when the business owners called Yahoo! to try to get their sites up and running again.
“All [the phone does] is ring and ring and a recording comes on,” said Rob Lewerentz, a commercial real estate broker who’s corporate website, Lewerentzcompany.com, has also been down since Black Friday.
When the broker finally got someone on the phone, Mayer’s small business team didn’t help much. “They say, you don’t have an account with us,” Lewrentz said incredulously.
Mayer, who took the reigns last year, has been under fire recently by long-time customers for bungling the Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s efforts to rejuvenate its popular email service.
Ironically, Yahoo!’s regular email service suffered blackouts last week. On Friday, Mayer apologized for the outage, saying the overhaul “was much more complex than it seemed at first.”
Yahoo!’s small business users have received no such apology or explanation for why their calls are not being answered or returned.
A company spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the clogged customer-service phone lines.
Brent Bolding of Dallas was frustrated, too, by his small business site going dark and his inability to get Yahoo! in the phone — until he decided to needle Mayer with a tweet.
“@marissamayer Yahoo Customer Care doesn’t answer phone, emails, tweets or facebook posts. Neither does Billing or Shareholder Services,” Bolding tweeted.
Bolding said people who identified themselves as being with Yahoo!’s “concierge customer care” immediately reached out and reestablished his site’s email account.