Yahoo Mail circling the drain?

I've commented several times on HN how the web needs a revenue model that's not spammy or scammy, and I always mention I'm glad to pay Yahoo $20/year for their Yahoo Plus mail. I get a decent mail service, I don't see any ads on it, it works with my iPhone, and I don't think they're as savvy as Google about collecting all my data.

So of course, just yesterday, they disappeared my wife's Yahoo Plus account. It started with an error message about the account being deactivated due to user request or inactivity, she was then taken to a screen to re-activate the account and than taken to a freshly initialized mail account. All her emails and folders are gone, the only thing left is a "Welcome to Yahoo" message. This is the email account that she uses every day, where her business emails are forwarded, where she stores her archives, and which is not due for renewal for another 6 months. What makes me think it's some form of error is that her 400+ contacts are unaffected.

And that's when we found out Yahoo has no customer service. She filed an incident ticket, they told her to call account verification, and after 30 minutes on hold, they said they couldn't help, but to reopen the ticket. In the meantime, the emails to and from support are disappearing from the "new" account.

Forums and social media are full of user complains about deactivated yahoo mail accounts, and some users claim to have lost their contacts as well. There is a group discussing this problem at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Y-Mail/

But I don't see any media stories about this. Yahoo is all over the news with their new CEO trying to turn things around, but their mail service that was rock solid for 15 years just gave up the ghost and their technical support is out to lunch. So, is anybody else having issues with it, or are we just the last people using Yahoo mail?