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Yahoo – “Unable to process request at this time — error 999”

April 19th, 2008 by steve

Recently I downloaded Yahoo! Autosync version 1.0.4.9 so I could put my Outlook calendar on Yahoo! and share it with the secretary at the office. It worked great at first — but then stopped performing as advertised — saying it was timing out when trying to communicate with the server.

Then when I would load my calendar at “http://calendar.yahoo.com” it would give me an error. Error 999.

Reporting this to Yahoo! gave me an automated reply giving several reasons for the problem, including one that said Yahoo! might be blocking my ISP because it was receiving too many transmissions from my ISP or my computer. I doubted this, but when I remote desktoped into my PC at the office, I could load the Yahoo! calendar page without any problem.

That’s when I knew it was either my ISP or my IP had been banned from accessing that page. I foolishly called my ISP and they were clueless. The poor tech person couldn’t even tell me how to reset my IP.

So I checked my IP (xxx.xxx.xxx.100), unplugged my modem for a minute, plugged it back in, checked that my IP had changed (xxx.xxx.xxx.10), and tried to load the page. It loaded.

That makes for two comical observations:

  1. My ISP tech support doesn’t know how to reset a users IP.
  2. Yahoo! is distributing software that, when used by their own clients, is interpreted by them as a DoS attack, causing them to BAN their own clients for having used Yahoo! software.

It’s a funny world.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under General Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Yahoo – “Unable to process request at this time — error 999””

  1. alacy Says:
    April 24th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Well on windows ipconfig can be used to change the IP address of the computer. However my DSL modem acts as a NAT. It gets one IP address from my ISP and then translates them to the computers on my home network. So that address that my computer has is different from the one that outside world such as yahoo see. Normally I don’t even know or care what it is. If I need the current one for some reason I use http://whatismyip.com/