Removal of the package (and distribution files) is a really bad thing. As result, all instances with frozen requirements immediately became broken.
It's broke our locked production requirements too.
Having the same problem here.
I apologize for the fallout on this decision. We were between a rock and a hard place, and we decided that removing a badly broken 4.1 would cause more trouble the longer we waited.
See https://github.com/yaml/pyyaml/issues/193 for details and the path forward to 4.2.
Most helpful comment
https://doughellmann.com/blog/2016/02/25/so-youve-released-a-broken-package-to-pypi-what-do-you-do-now/