Some of the UKs phone number infrastructure relies on Yahoo Groups, which is shutting down

Yahoo Groups is about to shut down, and it’s taking a lot of the old web with it. All content that had been posted there will be deleted by mid-December, and although it will be available for download before the end comes, the site will be largely shuttered by the end of this month.

Because Yahoo didn’t give the internet much warning, a lot of weird externalities of the company’s decision are being worked out in public. One that’s particularly surprising: the United Kingdom’s phone system actually relies in part on a Yahoo group founded in 2002 — which I learned about through a tweet.

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