What happens when your IM service goes down and you can communicate as quickly with the people who you need to contact? I ran into this exact dilemma yesterday when the Yahoo Messenger service was down. Check out the news story: “Yahoo outages frustrate some users.” 

According to Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars, “For a brief period early this morning, certain areas of Yahoo were inaccessible to a portion of registered users due to software-related issues. We have identified the issue and corrected it. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience, and we apologize to our users who might have been affected. We take these issues extremely seriously, and Yahoo is instituting new processes to protect against similar incidents from occurring again.”

This outage let me know how much I rely on IM at work. Sure, there are other ways to communicate, like that old-school method called e-mail, but there is something very gratifying about instant messaging. Did you experience problems with Yahoo Messenger? Are you equally hooked on IM?