Not too long after I wrote my R script to automate the computation of Spearman's correlation of stock counters (see here), the script failed to work. A real bummer indeed. To cut to the chase, the underlying import function from Quantmod was down.
As expected, the Quantmod package developer received a flurry of questions from disgruntled users who were also unable to import the historical stock data from Yahoo Finance into R for data processing. Well, it wasn't the developer's fault. Apparently, Yahoo Finance stealthily decided to discontinue the data importing functionality for no rhyme or reason.
For those interested, see the Yahoo Help Community thread on the matter here.
As quite a lot of people depend on Yahoo Finance's historical stock data for their data processing/stock market app/personal needs, a petition has been made to Yahoo to reinstate the service. Quite a lot of people, I noticed, were ......
I have moved to MarketXLS after this change, much more reliable data.