According to the latest reports, some of the Skype’s users
from Asia and Europe are able to sign in again
in their beloved IM and VoIP after the application was unavailable for at least
24 hours.
The first problems regarding Skype’s service outage were
reported on Thursday and the company quickly acknowledged on its website that
there is a problem.
"Some of you may be having problems logging into
Skype," the company wrote on its support blog at about 2 p.m. Greenwich
Mean Time, or about 10 a.m. Eastern U.S. Daylight time, on Thursday. "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.” it has been posted yesterday on the
site.
In order to prevent other problems, Skype Team had disabled
also downloads of the program.
But today the situation got better. According to a post on
Skype’s official blog , HeartbeatSkype, Skype is on its way back to full power.
“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.” reads the post.
Also the post signed by Villu Arak dismissed some of the
theories about the possible causes which led to the outbreak.
“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.” it’s been said on the blog.
In an earlier post Villu Arak blamed an algorithm for Skype’s
outage. “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.” he explained.
So, until an official motive will be announced, let’s admit
it was just a software bug.
Or just maybe Skype is reaching out its limits?
Skype, which is acquired by the auction site eBay, was founded
by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who are better known as the men behind Kaxaa.
The program, which uses peer-to-peer technology to connect
phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users, has became an
instant hit after its launch in August 2003.
Since it was acquired by eBay, the program added permanently
new features such as Skype Find, Skype Prime, Send Money, which allows users to
send money via PayPal from one Skype user to another.
Skype has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the latest
version 3.5 was launched earlier this month.
According to the latest data, there are 220 millions Skype
users and during a usual day there might be close to 5 or 6 million people
connected at any given time.
Since its launch this is the first time when Skype was
confronted with such a serious problem and it remains to be seen how fast it
will get back to its full capacity.