Skype Outage May Be Its Biggest Yet

Skype's down. The popular VoIP service went down sometime late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.

The outage is affecting users worldwide and Skype says it'll need 12-24 hours to get the problem fixed. That means this may be the farthest-reaching and longest-lasting outage in Skype's history. Skype says it now has almost 220 million accounts, and that 5 million to 6 million are usually logged in at any one time. Skype has become hugely popular among people who need to make frequent international calls.

Skype isn't saying much in the way of explanation, only that it's experiencing "software problems". Andy over at VoipWatch speculates the outage may be caused by a user authentification issue, because users who were logged into Skype when the problem occurred were able to stay logged in. Users trying to log in now are either rejected or booted from the system after only a few minutes.

Tom Keating speculates that the large number of Windows Vista and XP service patches that went out yesterday may have disrupted Skype's peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Skype uses the PCs of its users as peering points to route the incoming and outgoing calls of other users in the area. Om Malik wonders how reliable such P2P networks really are.

On the whole, the system has worked pretty reliably. Skype had a short outage in 2004, another short one in 2005 and none reported in 2006. The current outage is the first one reported in 2007.

If you're a Skype user, you can check here for Skype's progress toward fixing the problem.

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