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

|

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: 'Nobody's going to be 100% open'

The mobile apps ecosystems of the world may converge over time, led by apps being ported over across platforms, according to the Chief Software Architect.

Will Firefox beat IE9 to Direct2D rendering?

Just days after Microsoft executives gave conference attendees a peek at a new rendering technology, a Mozilla contributor revealed he's working on the same thing.

Where there's smoke: Apple warranty stance raises troubling questions

Carmi Levy | Wide Angle Zoom: Smoking can be dangerous not only for your lungs, it appears, but for your Apple hardware warranty.

The fallacy of Facebook privacy

Carmi Levy | Wide Angle Zoom: If an insurance company learns something interesting about its client through the Internet, is that snooping?

Microsoft 'worked with Apple' for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb

By not making such a big deal out of trying to stream video to the iPhone, Microsoft got a big deal out of it, revealed the Silverlight product manager.

Clicker.com cuts through the Web video chaos

In a world where homemade video and Hollywood movies travel the same pipeline, it's good to have a real search engine to cut through the clutter.

A case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3

A music composition product gambles with a complete overhaul, in an effort to make headway against two well-known competitors in a tough market.

Kindle 2 update adds battery life, native PDF reader

Amazon has pushed out an update to the Kindle 2 e-reader that lengthens battery life and adds a native PDF viewer.

Safari on iPhone gets competition from a $1 browser app

Apple likes to say it gives iPhone users a full browsing experience, but a new competitor tries to incorporate more desktop browser features.

Action Replay maker sues Microsoft for Xbox 360 'predatory technological barriers'

Third-party video game accessory maker Datel has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft over the Xbox 360's recent Dashboard update.