Skype Down Worldwide
If you’re like me and use IM pretty much constantly throughout the day then you can imagine what it’s like to have it suddenly turned off… pretty frustrating. As of the time of writing Skype seems to be down (confirmed here) and has been for the last few hours. Considering the millions of people who rely on it everyday I’m sure there must be a lot of angry users punching their keyboards about now! Having to send emails seems positively stone age compared with the instant gratification of the answer being a click away.
The Taiwan earthquake earlier in the year which damaged undersea cables showed just how much disruption can be caused by the failure of communication lines so if one service going silent is a mild annoyance I dread to think what would happen if there was a major outage.
How is this effecting your day?
— Updating below as more news comes in (RSS Feed) —
Update: Some interesting theories as to what’s causing the problems here and here. The outage appears to be worldwide.
Update 2: Skype have said they “expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours“. I wonder if there is any liability for all the businesses who rely on Skype and will have lost out as a result…?
Update 3: People are not having any luck getting any further information from Skype. Regarding liability, their terms of service seem to indicate that compensation is “limited to the amount actually paid by you for the Skype services during the year in which such damages occur” up to 5000 Euros. Wont be much constellation to small businesses I guess!
Update 4: Conspiracy theories already beginning – Could the Russians have DOSed Skype, are the Neocons taking action because they can’t wiretap it, or is this just a simple “software glitch”? Hmmm… I think a liberal pinch of salt is needed here 
Any way you look at the situation, it sucks!!
Update 5: So far had reports from Hong Kong, Denmark, Belgium, Malaysia, San Diego, Germany, Brazil, Orlando, Texas, Lithuania, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Montreal, Quebec, Thailand, China, Switzerland, Italy, London, Finland, Turkey, South Africa, Memphis, Florida, Malaga, Poland, France, India, Cyprus, Barbados, Netherlands, Italy, Singapore, Macedonia, Tokyo, Seoul, Bulgaria, Norway, Ireland, Jordan, Philippines… is there anywhere where Skype is actually working now? Apparently some users have been without service for over 14 hours already.
Update 6: Some interesting commentary on the situation from GigaOM (P2P limitations), Mashable (eBay stock down), Disruptive Telephony (end of the world?) & Epicenter (Skype wont comment).
Update 7: Skype have posted a new message on their Hearbeat blog -
“We’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to send us their thoughts, concerns and good wishes. It means the world to those working so hard to resolve this thing.”
…touching, but doesn’t really tell us any more about what the problem is! I guess there must be some pretty stressed out engineers at Skype today, so good luck to them! Acording to one user who was able to logon for a short time there are only 6000 users online – on a normal day there would be around 6 million.
Update 8: Last update before I head for bed – check out these pretty interesting graphs from Skype Journal, they show that there were over 6 million users online just before the service flatlined. Also another update from the Skype team:
“The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.
Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible.”
At least this is a little more informative, here’s hoping that it’s back up tomorrow!
Update 9 (17/08 – 9am BST): Some users are able to connected intermittently as the service begins to come back online. No definite confirmation from Skype yet but the signs are certainly positive. Should be interesting to see how this goes as Europe wakes up today. Is Skype working for you yet?
Update 10: Apart from having to deal with millions of disgruntled users, eBay (who own Skype) have also seen a slump in their share prices which, according to TechCrunch, knocked $1 billion off eBay’s market cap. It’s now been over 24 hours since the outage began.
Update 11 (7.30pm BST): Not a great deal of change since this morning although anecdotally more people are reporting being able to connect for short periods. Skype say they’re on the road to recovery but there seems to be little evidence for that yet. The O’Reilly Radar has raised some interesting points about Skype and the General Public Licence – would it help Skype to be less secretive about their network technology?
Update 12 (18/09 – 12.30pm BST): Welcome Back, World! So it finally looks like after 48 hours of downtime that Skype is back online. As of now I can see close to 6 million people online which is the normal average. Skype have said that they’ll provide a more detailed explanation on Monday – should be interesting to hear what actually happened! Happy skyping all 
Update 13 (20/09): Skype have posted a slightly more detailed explanation of what happened last week. Turns out the effect of peoples computers restarting on mass after a windows update caused the network meltdown when they all tried to login again and in turn the inbuilt self-healing mechanisms failed.
Possibly related posts:
Down in Greece and all over the world …
It was dos attack ?
software algorithm ?
negative advertise for more skype clients ?
who knows ? who has the ability to know ?
Skype is down in Singapore, it was working yesterday morning (Aug. 16th ) but has been down for over 24h.
Here is Bulgaria. My personal oppinoin: this is atack cause it smells so much already. We are not that stupid. This “algorithm” is made by them, and was working with more than 9 milns online. Even I like skype so much, I guess this crash is for better. All “Big” so much growing companies have to realise how actualy small they are.
Still not connecting to the servers during last more than 24 hours. In about any hour I connect for less than a minute.
Thats it
Dont have to cry so much, live goes, and always for better. ( by the way my last 24 hours are realy not so good )
I think there must be something to this attack theory. Colorado in North America is still down also.
An algorithm issue seems very unlikely.
We rely heavily on Skype and hope they come back.
I liked the quote from Skype “The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen.”.
You can love your customers, doesn't mean you won't be impacted.
4pm BST Dublin Ireland. Looks like they are back. Been up for over 10 minutes now….even got a phone call in
Skype seems to be fine for me (in Belgium). However, it doesn't seem to connect on my company's account. How weird!
never mind…..down again
skype is still down in Thailand…
Still down in Germany 17 Aug. @ 1700
I am in Jordan and I have actually had intermittent connection over the day today. It is little use though since it does not last for more than 5 minute and no more than a couple of my contacts are connected at the same time.
I'm in the Philippines. Had SKYPE connection for almost 12 hours. Now at 17 GMT it's down again.
Oooops, now it's running again!
here in BG I have an account that works for an houre and more till this recent moment, and another one that did not connect on all that time.
7:20 CET and still down in Brussels, Belgium…
myname hello,dude!And I'm from BG,but I have tried to login,but nothing
now i'm online
o fine, lachko
I did it since I have told already in last my post, so – still connected, BUT the other account that is benn uesturday actualy updated to the newes 3.5.0.202 si stil out ot the system… very strange, but as so many places over the net are not yet connected, it means the problem remain
Here in Philippines, yep I had a greeting from a friend when I logged in Meebo to use my YM there, “I can't login skype!”, well nice greeting and didn't even asked how I was because I just had an asthma attack.
I decided to use another IM service since it was amazing to see that on a Friday night my Skype contacts are gray and offline. I am expecting SMS services countrywide to experience a sharp peak today due to Skype down. Probably more sales in McDonald's, people eat out because of Skype down. We know Skype is a part of our lives already…will it stay or go?
My skype shows that there are more than 4 millions online, but excluding me. I am becoming a little bit angry.
I'm online now, and its showing a little less than 3 million users connected. I was able to chat to some friends earlier but obviously not everyone can connect still.
Hello Ladies and Gents.
Skype seems to be up and running now. To make it work you should download the new version 3.5.0.214 posted on their website a few minutes ago.
For the techies, here is a link explaining what — supposingly — has been happening:
http://voipguides.blogspot.com/2007/08/skype-ou...
Skype's up and running.
It's midnight in Switzerland, 5.5 milion users are online and I just had a 20 minute coll with my friend in Argentina without any problem! Just fine!
Skype was down here in Japan for 2 days!… now it seems back up again…. I think its sorted out now
Tallahassee Florida USA
Skype STILL down.
GOODBYE Skype…. Hello Gizmo!
The moral to this story is DON'T SET YOUR MS UPDATE TO AUTO RESTART. Allow it to be a manual restart operation. The Skype p2p SuperNode failover algorithm has been adjusted for the many Skype authentication servers to pickup the failed supernode load. Hopefully this won't happen again.
I'm sure the “bad” guys are pondering how to exploit this flaw. I think adding more DBAR (disaster backup and recovery) servers and procedures will be key here too.
Gizmo and Vonage still sucks… IMO – GIZMO/VONAGE vs. SKYPE? Think about SAIC-Remailer Version 2007? http://tinyurl.com/yo5fr6
It could happen…