The problem, first observed at around 11:40 a.m. Pacific Time, appears to have primarily in the eastern United States and Canada who were trying to reach the www.yahoo.com domain.

Network engineers on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) discussion list that when they tried to reach www.yahoo.com, they were sent on the Internet's version of a wild goose chase. DNS (Domain Name System) servers redirected traffic to another Yahoo domain, www.wa1.b.yahoo.com, which was not associated with an IP address. In other words, computers trying to find Yahoo's Web site were sent nowhere.

The problem appeared to have been resolved by about 1 p.m. Pacific Time.

Yahoo did not have much to say about the outage. The company confirmed in a statement that it had "a disruption in service earlier today that affected users in some geographic areas."

One NANOG poster, apparently a Yahoo employee named Matthew Petach, that the problem was triggered by a Juniper T1600 router that "went kablooie."