Yahoo’s e-mail service has suffered a major outage which has been impacting users in Australia as well as parts of the US and the UK.

The outage arrived yesterday, just one day after Verizon’s US$4.48-billion deal to takeover Yahoo’s Internet properties had been finalised. It is unclear what caused the outage.

Separately, Verizon yesterday began cutting staff at Yahoo’s sites by laying off 39 journalists at HuffPost. This appears to be just the start of what is expected to be a 15 percent staff reduction across Yahoo and the Verizon-owned AOL.

About 2000 Yahoo and AOL workers are expected to lose their jobs as Verizon cuts costs and eliminates duplicated positions.

Verizon will combine Yahoo and AOL into a single business unit called Oath. The Australian joint venture with Kerry Stokes’ Seven business, Yahoo7, will continue.