August 16th, 2007
Worldwide Skype outage - updated
Update 2: Friday morning and Skype is down again. Fellow ZDNet blogger George Ou thinks there may be a DDOS attack in play based on a recent, publicly released exploit but Skype’s official announcement refutes that. I had service most of the evening yesterday with intermittent outages but I’m not able to infer a lot from that.
Update: Service appears to be restored as 5:25 pm MDT.
I’ve been unable to access Skype all day and it turns out it’s not just me. User from around the world are reporting the service is down and impacting personal and business communications for potentially millions of people. There’s not a lot of information available at this time. Here’s what Skype posted on their blog earlier today:
Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience.
As of this writing – 10:40 am MDT (GMT -7), service is still not restored. Here’s hoping whatever te cause is gets discovered and dealt with quickly. Skype has had performance stutters from time to time but this is the first global outage I can recall since I first began using the service and it’s bound to undermine the confidence many people have had in their availability and viability as a replacement for a conventional land line.
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
