Skype Hit by Major Outage, Downloads Disabled

By the Betanews Staff | Published August 16, 2007, 11:05 AM

Skype suffered a major outage early Thursday morning in what is being characterized as a "software issue" related to users logging into the service. Engineers say it will take them 12 to 24 hours to fix the problem, and in the meantime have disabled all downloads of the Skype client.

The company, owned by eBay, has not specified what exactly caused the outage, but Skype has a strong history of reliability. It's possible there was some database corruption related to user logins, which could explain the lengthy time needed to repair the issue.

Comments

View comments by with a score of at least

NSA

Score: 0

|

http://heartbeat.skype.com/
"Where we are at 1100 GMT

By My status Villu Arak on August 17, 2007.

Hello all,

As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.

An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight."

Score: 0

|

its technology its bound to fail thats what keep IT GUYS in business :)

Score: 0

|

I knew it wouldn't take long for e-bay to ph*** things up:-) LMAO

Score: 0

|

Yeah, I still can't sign in right now, which stinks because, other than e-mail, skype is my only method of contact for some people I work with.

Score: 0

|

UPDATE:

I let Skype sit all day trying to connect, and it *just* got connected about 1 minute ago.

Score: 0

|

not sure if it is related but as of couple days already mine just refuses to start and kicks out "don't panic" message from skype.exe . uninstall/reinstall does not help. kinda vierd since i just reimaged my machine about 2 weeks ago...

Score: 0

|

Worked for me just fine this morning, although sputtered a bit before it got going.

Score: 0

|

I have not been able to log in for the last 12 hours

Score: 0

|

Other than hurricanes, I can't recall a single major phone outage in my area in 44 years. Localized, sure. Car wrecks, tree limbs, lightning strikes. But entire area or citywide? Never. It seems service outages on the Internet are more common than that and rarely due to natural disasters. Mostly software or human error or DoS attacks. As much I dislike cable and telco providers, they seem to be way ahead on reliability of service.

Score: 0

|

A real beta process at work: Mozilla fires up Firefox 3.6 Beta 2

In the clearest sign yet that public input really does help the development process, a flurry of bug detections provoked Mozilla to release Beta 2 of the next Firefox.

Kindle for PC opens in beta, underwhelms

Amazon has opened the beta of Kindle for PC, a companion to the Kindle, but little else.

European ministers approve watered-down 'neutral net' language

The latest provision in the EU's telecoms regulatory framework would let businesses cancel individuals' Internet access, if they go to court first.

Snow Leopard and Windows 7 still can't crack the netbook problem

Apple has killed Atom support in OS X 10.6.2 and Windows 7 Starter Edition is stripped of "basic" functionality.

Bing vs. Google rematch on video search

After Microsoft folds some old MSN Video features back into Bing, do they add to the search engine's functionality or take away?

HP to acquire 3Com for $2.7 B in cash, focus on China

A long and uncertain comeback trail comes to an end for the one-time network equipment giant.

Bing gets geekier with new Wolfram Alpha integration

Microsoft's Bing is now teamed up with Wolfram Alpha for computational search results.

Universities reject Kindle DX as a textbook replacement

Two universities running Kindle DX pilot programs have rejected the device.

New EU telecoms framework mandates user consent before getting cookies

Do you want a cookie? No. Do you want a cookie? No. Do you want a cookie? No. Do you want...Are you annoyed yet? That's a preview of 2011.

The Samsung Intrepid: A nice phone, if you can accept Windows Mobile

Samsung appears to have built solid enough hardware, but it's the software that seems uncomfortable and unintuitive.

It's the US vs. the EU over Oracle+Sun and the meaning of 'open source'

Now that the EU is a virtual country, the US Justice Dept. is taking a stand in favor of its view -- and against the EC's -- that MySQL will survive under Oracle.