Yahoo restores automatic email forwarding after brief outage

Yahoo had earlier disabled the automatic mail forwarding feature from the website.

Yahoo says it has restored automatic email forwarding after a brief outage sent a flutter of indignation across the internet.

Yahoo Mail executive Michael Albers says in a statement the feature had been disabled as Yahoo upgraded its platform.

News of the outage, first reported by The Associated Press, came following Yahoo's announcement that millions accounts had been compromised by hackers and allegations of collusion with US intelligence.

Some wondered whether the outage was aimed at preventing people from leaving Yahoo amid the negative headlines, but the statement said the feature was turned off to allow the company to tweak its search function and improve performance.

Brian McIntosh, a computer professional who first flagged the issue to AP, said forwarding now worked "just the same way it did before!"