It used to be that being locked out of your e-mail for a day or two was no big hardship. Now our e-mail boxes are lifelines to finding and performing work, receiving financial documents and paying bills, and sometimes even staying in contact with people. Some Yahoo Mail users are not pleased that the sudden “scheduled maintenance” of Yahoo Mail has locked them out of their accounts since Sunday night.

Reader John is one affected user. “Yahoo said on their Facebook page that they expected the situation to be corrected by 1:30 PM Pacific time [yesterday],” he notes. That deadline passed without everyone magically regaining access. “Since then Yahoo has gone into silence — no messages, notices, or other communication regarding the outage.”

The last announcement from the company regarding the problems came in the form of this tweet, also posted to Facebook.

The Facebook version of the announcement has more than 1,700 angry comments posted as recently as a few minutes ago.

We contacted Yahoo about the outage, and will let you know what they have to say when they respond. UPDATE: Yahoo has told us that the problem is due to a server problem, and they hope to have it fixed by 3 P.M. Pacific time today. Here’s their full statement:

Some of our users have not been able to access their mail since 10:27 PM PT on Monday night, due to a hardware problem in one of our mail data centers. The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected.

We have dozens of people working around the clock to bring it to a resolution. We believe our current efforts will restore our users’ access to their inboxes by 3 pm PT today. We’ll post again then on our @YahooMail Twitter handle.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.