Yahoo Mail DOWN - Email service NOT WORKING as customers hit with login problems

UPDATE – 15:30 

Yahoo Mail is now back online.

A spokesperson for Yahoo told Express.co.uk: "Some Yahoo Mail users experienced issues today. We worked quickly on a fix, and functionality is now restored."

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Yahoo Mail is believed to be experiencing issues across the UK and mainland Europe, with customers left unable to send, receive emails or login to the online service.

The issues were first reported around 13:30 GMT.

BT Mail customers have also been left unable to access their email accounts. Yahoo currently runs the system that powers BT email addresses.

Independent website Down Detector, which measures social mentions around a certain topic to track outages across the globe, shows problems throughout the UK and Europe.

Enraged customers have flooded social media to complain about the problems.

"So Yahoo Mail is down! almost died" one Yahoo Mail user tweeted.

"Hope it hasn't been hacked again :-( highly frustrating" another added.

Another posted: "Anyone having trouble with Yahoo mail?"

According to the latest crowd-sourced statistics from Down Detector, some 44 per cent of users have been left unable to login.

Meanwhile, 29 per cent and 26 per cent respectively are currently unable to receive or read emails on Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Mail have tweeted users who are having problems with the email service, writing "We are aware that some Yahoo Mail users are currently experiencing issues.

"We apologize to those affected" (sic)

This is not the first time the hugely-popular email service has had problems.

Last year, Yahoo Mail suffered an enormous outage, with thousands of customers left unable to access their email inbox for some 10 hours or so.

At the time, an administrator for Yahoo posted on a user forum, reassuring: "It has come to our attention that several customers are experience temporary errors or are about to start seeing them.

"This could be any error number as its a large outage. Our engineering team is aware and is working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible."

This latest issue comes at a bad time for Yahoo.

The global technology company admitted a fresh security breach to its systems resulted in the theft of personal information from at least one billion user accounts.

An investigation is still ongoing into the breach, which Yahoo said took place in 2013.

For those who use Yahoo Mail, here's how to check if your BT Mail account, Sky UK account or Yahoo Mail was hacked.

Here is how to change the password associated with your account.

"Yahoo has identified data security issues concerning certain Yahoo user accounts," the firm said in a statement.

"Yahoo has taken steps to secure user accounts and is working closely with law enforcement.

"As Yahoo previously disclosed in November, law enforcement provided the company with data files that a third party claimed was Yahoo user data.

"The company analysed this data with the assistance of outside forensic experts and found that it appears to be Yahoo user data.

"Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, Yahoo believes an unauthorised third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with more than one billion user accounts."

Yahoo said that the stolen information includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and hashed passwords.

But payment card data or bank account information was not compromised, Yahoo added.

Yahoo also provides email accounts for a number of partners, including BT, Sky UK, Verizon, AT&T, Frontier, Rogers, Spark, and MTS.