The fact that Yahoo still exists as a company might come as a shock to some people, but they are, in fact, going strong, acquiring over twenty companies so far this year, including Tumblr for $1.1 billion because … why not?

While not quite at the level of Hotmail (yet), it is always a little embarrassing to hear that someone still uses a Yahoo email account. Beyond the company’s general lack of coolness, they’ve also had some serious, concrete issues lately as users have been reporting that their Yahoo Mail service has been down for 24 hours or even as long as two days, according to complaints via Twitter (News - Alert).

A typical complaint by an unsatisfied customer went as such: “Yahoo mail has been down for 48 hours. Literally unable to even check your inbox period.”

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Users have run into the occasional issue with Google (News - Alert), but never for such an extended period of time. The typical talking point with companies that provide these services is that they are free, and so they have no obligation to work when you need them to, etc.

There is a difference, though, between not paying someone for services and those services being free. Not only do companies such as Google and Yahoo make a great deal of money off of you using their email services, they also share your private data and, in certain cases, sell it to advertisers as well.

With many issues related to technological advancements in the past twenty years, there was no way to judge the value of something like email until it was too late. We paid for it originally through services like AOL (News - Alert) and when we could start getting it for free, we assumed that this was the better option. At the end of the day, though, there is a price that people will pay when they are unable to access their email for a day or two. And that price is a lot higher than free.