Skype Outage Continues for Millions

Internet phone and video service Skype reported directly to its customers on Twitter and its blog that it is working to correct a massive outage that affected almost all users Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, some customers were able to log on, but millions are still without service.

According to Skype, the outage was caused by a massive failure of its "supernodes"- a series of routing hubs that facilitate communication between Skype users. The company is working to build new "mega-supernodes" to make a workaround for the problem. The company has not yet reported the cause of the failure.

Many industry experts on Wednesday contemplated whether the Skype outage was caused by a denial of service (DDOS) attack. In recent weeks, hacker groups supporting the whistleblower website WikiLeaks have briefly interrupted VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal- all sites that have denied service to WikiLeaks after pressure was applied by the U.S. government. There is no indication of a relationship between Skype and WikiLeaks.

Skype experienced a similar widespread outage in 2007, when the company was owned by eBay. However, at that time, most Skype users were individuals. Since 2007, the company has been sold to private investors and has attracted the business of companies of all sizes worldwide.

Corporate reliance on international communications makes this service outage particularly damaging to Skype. Companies have several options when it comes to voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) service providers, and instability with the platform may cause larger corporate customers to seek other options. At a time when Skype is working up to its first initial public offering, the flight of revenues could be devastating.

Skype's most recent blog post reports that almost 5 million people are already online, about 30 percent of normal volume, with the rest expected to have service restored later in the day. The company reports that some features, such as group video calling, will take longer to get back online.

A recent milestone report from the company stated that it had reached a service volume of 25 million concurrent users for the first time earlier in the year, so the 30 percent figure may be low.

According to the company, updates will continue throughout the day on both the company's blog and its Twitter feed.