Ever since Yahoo announced to buy the social bookmarking service del.icio.us about a week ago, it has been plagued with instability. More often than not, I get an error message when I try to access the website. At the time of this writing I am getting the following error: “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible."

I realize that the announcement of the acquisition must be causing a lot of extra traffic for del.icio.us, and I hope that they can figure out a way to recover from this soon. Several months ago I have started to use del.icio.us as my main bookmarking application, mostly to facilitate sharing bookmarks across various computers, platforms, and browsers, both at home and at work. I realize that several alternatives exist, such as de.lirio.us, but I would prefer to continue using de.licio.us (unless of course Yahoo manages to screw it up…).

Update: Apparently del.icio.us is currently recovering from the aftermath of a power outage that hit them a few days ago. They are posting status updates and other info on the del.icio.us blog.