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.
Enjoyed this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.
What’s your current location? UK seems to be partially cut off Skype.
I’m in London, UK. Also friends in South Korea and Japan can’t logon.
I’m in Hk and it is down too
Seems to be down worldwide although it intermittently logs me on for a few minutes but fails to send/receive messages. The engineers at Skype must be having a really bad day!
Your second link to a theory for the outage is a blog post from September 2004
Whooops… that’ll teach me for posting before reading properly
Thanks!
I am still online in Denmark. Only 594.146 users online and still going down. I will be cut off everytime now, I think.
Update from Skype:
Yikes - up to 24 hours downtime!
I’m in Belgium and Skype has been down since the start of the day today. Frustrating! I’ve quit the application till tonight (fingers crossed, it’ll be up and running by then) because it is annoying, seeing it try to connect all day.
also in malaysia kuala lumpur. i wonder what caused this.
The REALLY bad thing is that my Skype-In line is down and there is no way to forward it to my regular line since Skype is down. Wish I could do that from my login at skype.com! All in all, it’s been a great service. Now I know that I need alternatives!
Down here in San Diego . . .
I’m in Germany.
Skype is down since this morning.
Is it related to the yesterday’s planned mainenance?
Interesting point Hans… must have been a pretty big mess up to cause such widespread disruption. I guess with such a complex system you can never be sure of the knock on effect of any changes made to the network.
Does anyone know of any alternatives which offer similar functionality and cross-platform compatibility? I’ve not heard of any which can make the skype-in/out type calls.
Skype has been up and down (more often down than up) since early in the morning here in Brazil. I’m glad to know it’s not just me so I cam give up troubleshooting my settings.
what a mess .. I all but forgot how terrible MSN is; but at least it’s up
It would be nice if they put a notice on skype.com letting people know instead of hiding it. I would have preferred being able to get the info directly from them instead of googling for info on it. I DO REALLY appreciate your posting on this. I would be beating my head against some hard product somewhere if it weren’t for you! Thanks!
And i’m like an idiot spent 3 or 4 hours trying to make skype to work.i did everything possible:antivirus scan,registry scan,antispyware scan,checked firewall,turned my wirelees router inside out,downloaded all possible updates,did system restore,and that bloody thing still does not connect.And only when i was reading an article about skype in wikipedia i found this:16/08/2007 worldwide skype outage.I guess without seeing it i’d throw my laptop through the window.
Down here in the Tampa /Orlando area too. Stinks!
Down in TX too… Skype is my only voice provider. Hope the phones come back on soon.
My brother just sent me sms from Lithuania.No Skype there.
Skype has a message on their site:
“UPDATED 16 August, 2007 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging in to 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 apologize for the inconvenience.”
I’m in Canada and discovered the problem at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Let’s hope they get this fixed soon… My best to the engineers.
One possible alternative to skype is is gizmoproject, http://gizmoproject.com. It seems to be pretty similar to skype, except that it supports SIP calls. This allows it to be integrated with office VOIP PBXes (like Asterisk).
Some of you?I’d say all of you.
Skype is down in US and also Argentina so I guess world wide…Anyone tried to contact Skype? Had no success even submitting a question via their site? Any info at all out there as to what is going on and how long it will be down?
Skype has been sucking out lately!!! The connection quality and chatter has dirt quality!!
I need Sype or else i will shoot this cute kitten! jk
UK - Still down. Grandfather in Australia - no skype there.
Mind you, Skype is an annogram of “Pesky”
In response to the question of liability - From Skype’s Terms of Service:
Skype’s liability to you
Limitation of liability. In the event of Skype being in breach of any of its obligations towards you under these Terms of Service, Skype will accept liability to pay damages only to the extent laid below:
Skype can only be held liable for direct damages resulting from an attributable failure to perform its obligations under these Terms of Service. Direct damages in this respect exclusively mean all reasonable costs incurred by you in order to (i) have Skype perform its obligations under the Terms of Service or (ii) to prevent or limit such costs.
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Skype shall not be liable for any indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages whatsoever (including but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for loss of privacy arising out of or in any way related to the use of or inability to use the Skype products, even if Skype has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
The direct damages as meant in this article shall be limited to the amount actually paid by you for the Skype services during the year in which such damages occur. In no event, however, shall the total compensation for any direct damages exceed 5,000 Euro, unless the loss is due to Skype’s willful default or gross negligence.
Down here in Montréal, Québec, Canada
10:45 GMT-5
;-(
Skype is also down in Canada
This is an absolute nightmare for those of us who depend on Skype daily or for business. I have a skype in and cannot make or receive calls. I have been transitioning to yahoo over the past few months (due to Skypes lack of USA caller id and price hikes) and looking into other providers as well. But really I was on the fence because I’ve used skype for so long…However, this pretty much made my decision for me.
Live in Thailand . . . sill no Skype here. It was intermittant this morning but has gone down hill since then. Looks like it will be closer to 24 hours.
Was it a DOS attack ? (Skype is down in Switzerland & in Italy)
If it is a software bug couldn’t you roll back?
Skype developer and managers, please note that:
1)
ArpaNet was designed to grant connectivity between any two nodes in case of nuclear war where intermediate nodes could get offline (is internet above the percolation threshold?).
2)
Skype should exploit better the advantages of P2P.
3)
If I were an investor would I get money back ?
I am in London, Ontario Canada…and it is not working either! I am glad that it isn’t just my machine, lol. I hope it comes back up soon. I have a lot of calls to make. Crossing Fingers.
We here in Dourado, Sao Paulo, Brazil are also down with skype.
Hope Skype comes online soon , as here in Brazil our telephone rates are absolutely abusive.
We understand that nothing is foolproof, and just hope our Skype team gets its problem resolved soon
Skype is down in Finland also. Sometimes i can log in, but it cuts me off. I can see little bit over 500 000 users online, but i think they are out of service too. skype.co website has timeout at time to time… Could it be DoS attack against servers or just bad luck… Skype engineers have no problem how to spent their time next few hours…or worse… next few days.
I do hope they fix it fast because i use it for calls abroad. But for business people who depends on service it is much more worse situation.
Skype is down in SW Turkey, logs on for 30 seconds then disconnects again.
I found new information about skype. It is not down
You just can’t login.. see following skype team announcement:
Yhey hope they fix the problem in 12 to 24 hours
http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/problems_with_skype_login.html
OK has anybody out there done the math yet? Read this old news story:
1) http://www.kommersant.com/p725672/r_527/visit_Bush_Estonia/
Then read this May 2007 story:
2) http://www.lunchoverip.com/2007/05/estonia_under_c.html (You can read his NY TIMES link here: http://d.cl1p.net/estonia/ )
Read the US Govt’s side of the story:
3) http://tinyurl.com/2tjty6
4) http://tinyurl.com/32bhot
5) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS22692.pdf
Now do the math:
http://tinyurl.com/34rkze
(An “Oh shit!” FoxNews story about Skype! The Neocons are really pissed now!)
Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist but come on folks! Do you really think the Russians are doing this “thing” being called a “software glitch” today?
Not likely…
does anyone knows when it all started.About 1am this morning skype was working ok.11am wnen woke up it was just dead.
Skype down in South Africa
If Skype comes back up in 48 hours I’ll be surprised. It may be down for the count as long as certain Nosy Sneaky Analyst people want to listen in to our Skype calls. “If you can’t beat ‘em {crash} ‘em!”
Skype is down in Memphis, for Elvis week…
Slightly *ANNOYED* that it wasn’t connecting. I originally thought that Skype did something on their end and went through checking my router settings and ports.
Not a happy SkypeOut camper.
Thanks for everyone’s comments - please keep them coming, especially in the absence of much comment from Skype themselves (as Dawn pointed out)! Pretty poor response from their PR people it seems so far.
Down in sw florida, just hooked up skype at work, needless to say it dosent look good for skype or myself. It better be up quick
Nothing since 6pm today…. its now 1:30am…
If anyone’s looking for a really reliable alternative, why not try the public telephone network?! It’s telephony grade, 99.9999999% uptime!
I think it wouldn’t bother me as much if I could forward my Skype-in or change my voicemail. If I could forward it from the skype.com site (like I can in Vonage) then I wouldn’t be so bothered. That is my busines line and I get up to 20 calls per day. If it’s down for more than a day it could get ugly. It seems like it would be easy to do from my account login at skype.com. They may want to consider that for the tons of business users out there. Although I’ve been thinking about just adding another Vonage line instead because the call quality has become a problem and I’ve been getting complaints. But it truly is a great service all-in-all. I had a cable internet outage a week ago, so it’s just part of the tech-reliant industries. Nothing is perfect!
Thanks for the tip Tom
Somehow I don’t think I can phone China for £0.03/min on my landline!!
You’re not with the right company then dude!
Wow - sounds a bit global. Here in Malaga, SpainI thought it was my PC having had the phone cut off for a few days. Saves me spending any more time trying to fix it!
Rick
Skype just came up! Back online for now in the Memphis area…
OK THIS SUCKS…
out again. that didn’t last long.
256K users last time I got in… YIKES …. the heartbeat page says
SkypeOut All working normally.
SkypeIn All working normally.
Skype Voicemail All working normally.
Skype SMS All working normally.
That’s a joke… if you cant login.. NOTHING works …
Monki
I’m a developer in Poland and rely on skype to communicate with coders etc.
If they would just give access I could fix the problem in an hour
Oh well; guess we’ll all just bitch and love them again next week.
Would really still like to get my hands on some of their early stock
David, you CAN call China for FAR less than £0.03/min from your landline in the UK.
Possible with various companies and no accounts needed using “dial around” info here:
callchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/intcallchecker/china
I have used some of the 1p/min ones to call China and countries in South America in the past
Skype is down!!!!!!……shazam!
Oh hell, it screwed me double, same time as skaype went down my telefon line did the dump too…
I am without connection to the outside world….
Only the Inet is working and my mobile
WK
(Annecy, France)
Skype is down is Austin Texas, USA also. Tomorrow is the day when I am to pay for the new bill. For the voice mail etc. I will have to consider this as a non-option considering the current situation.
what a coincidence ! wordl financial markets are suffering one of there metdown days and skype is down. 22 million users disconnected from skyping there brokers/bankers etc.
an some new silent privacy rules at skype: look at the FAQ on “backup of skype contcats” and You will find the reassuring news that skype is now storing Your contacts at their central server !
OK FOLKS… SKYPE IS DOWN ACROSS THE PLANET!
No it’s not a local phenomena its GLOBAL! Skype does have contingency plans for a SIMPLE outage. They have backup servers in Luxembourg, Tallin, and San Jose CA. They alos use your PC’s as P2P routers. They are scrambling right now trying to figure out how this happened and if its artificial WHO’s doing it and from where.
If it’s the later “they” want Skype to look bad and drive away customers. Since most of them write in “squiggling” lines on SkypeCast you do the math… This is IMHO a “campaign” of the cyber-attack kind. I think its a tad more sophisticated than a DoS attack. Certian agency of the American government have already changed their mission statements to read that they will help American industry compete with foreign industry. Just GOOGLE in-q-tel “san jose” ca and find out what “is right up their alley.”
Don’t blame Skype. They were blind sided by some really smart hackers with heavy duty CD degrees form ivy league colleges. I know their screaming right now to the EU asking for terrorist charges to be filed against the perpetrators. If you read my links above in my other post you see they already did that a couple of months ago the 1st time it happened.
I think VONAGE is going to get a lot of new business. And I hate VONAGE as it sucks even more. I’d rather go back to DialPad or that other creepy VOIP vendor that I forget. This sucks as I have a bunch of business calls to make and receive!!! Complain to your congressman in intelligence oversight to make ‘em stop! This is NOT what they meant by The Patriot Act!
Oops: I meant CS degrees not CD Degrees. (CS = Computer Science)
This sucks. I use Skype for all my IM. Just gald I have been using Jangl for my voice calls.
Looks like August 16th 2007 is going to go down in history as “Worldwide Skype Outage Day” - has there ever been an outage which has effected so many people (millions) like this before? I can’t think of any off hand.
Alas even in norfolk (where skype is still seen as the cutting edge of new technology), we are having problems haha!
Just thought I’d add that we’re still offline in Copenhagen, Denmark at 7:06 GMT.
Hi. I am from Sofia city - the capital of Bulgaria and Skype is down all day. 1-2 times I were logged in, but after I sent and received few messages, it dropped me and now stays on “Connecting”. I have posted the news on my blog too. Hope Skype to be soon online, because it is very thrustrating situation.
Skype is up …oops no wait .. it is down again
I finally get some housework done this way …
And reminds me to cope all my contacts on msn, icq and yahoo IM too.
I am from Kerala, India. Skype has been down for abt 8 hours. It shows signing in status but stays just like that. I now a days use only skype and am now really in a black out. Lets hope it will be back even better by tomrw.
SKYPE come back we are waiting for your service…
At CST 11:00am in Texas, US I could log into skype. I also made a ‘toll free’ phone call. While my laptop kept putting up struggle, it connected again for a few seconds. Something seems to work… occasionally. Yet, like y’all, I’m keeping my fingers crossed too.
Skype is down in Cyprus tooooooooooooo…!!!!:(((
skype down in Barbados too
I am in the Netherlands and second day that skype is down. It did connect briefly this morning (there si hope?) but after a minute went down again.
I have gizmo running on my PC just fo rthese kinds of moments.
http://gizmoproject.com/
I put in 20 dollars and I am just fine to call landlines or mobiles phones at least. Since most people don’t have gizmo loaded on their PCs, you can’t really do a PC to PC call. Either way I stil making really calls overseas.
Finally… I see 3 million folks online. Relief, at last… with a realization that we’re so ardent slaves of technology!
It seems that skype step by step is slowly coming up. I live in Italy. Today I can communicate with several friends from Lithuania.
My brother in Lithuania says that skype slowly comming up but still very unstable connection
Still down in London but connects occasionally before dropping off again…
Still down in Belgium (at least for me). Connects for a minute then drops off again.
It’s still down here in Singapore. Managed to connect once or twice in the morning (after non-stop trying), before getting booted off after making one call per login.
Still down in the Republic of Macedonia.
I was just browsing the forums, and saw this funny pic on the Skype forums, I got a giggle out of it
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=94423
Belgium. I’ve been able to log on for 1 hour now, this is the longest since yesterday morning! There are approx 2 250 000 people online, so hopefully thing are getting back to normal.
South Africa also down - this link will show your the number of skype users currently online …not pretty at all
Still down in China
HAVENT SEEN Skype in NORWAY FOR ATLEAST 18 HOURS NOW
Skype seems to be up in Belgium!
and seems like in Malaysia as well.
12.30pmBST Still down in Ireland
Here in London:
I connect to Skype for about 1 minute per half hour. Contacts’ icons go green and number of users online appears but I don’t actually get to be able to talk to anyone. Right now Skype says “connecting”.
Mikko - I’m seeing exactly the same behaviour. On one occasion when I was momentarily online I was able to send an SMS message but not sure if it got through!
The updates on the Skype’s main web page are ridiculous!
F*** Skype really! I am sooooooooooooo pissssssssssed offffffffff!!!
(Belfast, UK).
Still down in Dublin Ireland, won’t allow any connection!
Still offline here in South Africa. I wonder if all the people trying to reconnect at once are overloading the server?
still down in florida 9:40 am est friday.
Down in Bahrain. Can’t get in with my account can occasionally log on with wifes account.
How odd. Must be some fantastic conspiracy theories out ther.