Skype Outage Could Affect Millions, Company Says
Access Disruption Could Rival the 2007 Extended Outage
As of 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Skype users worldwide were still reporting that they are unable to log into their service. Some are able to go "live," but cannot see any of their contacts. Others are reporting no outage or interruptions, but those reports are sporadic.
Skype reported in November that it had reached a new milestone of 25 million concurrent users, rivaling some cellular phone service providers. Its total user base is in excess of 500 million users.
Skype is going through major ownership changes and is on the verge of issuing an IPO. The company was sold in 2009 by eBay to private investors, at which time it was valued at $2.75 billion.
Skype has not yet provided details of the nature of the outage or how many of its customers are being impacted. Rumors abound that the service has been hit with a denial of service (DDOS) attack by WikiLeaks supporters, but this has not been confirmed by any hacker group. Earlier this month, VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal were all hit by denial of service attacks for their withdrawal of services to the whistleblower group. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being investigated by the U.S. government over the leak of confidential documents. There is no known connection between Skype and WikiLeaks at this time, but a DDOS attack would explain the widespread outage.
In August 2007, when eBay still owned Skype, the company experienced a software malfunction that left the service disabled across the board for more than 24 hours. The stock of the company took a hit because of the outage, but recovered quickly.
The Skype blog, which appears to contain an update on the situation, is also unavailable to most users as of 3 p.m. EST. This could be related to the service outage, or simply due to the volume of users seeking answers to the problem.
Published by Angie Mohr CA CMA - Featured Contributor in Business & Finance and Lifestyle
Angie Mohr is a Chartered Accountant and Certified Management Accountant who has worked with thousands of business clients from home-based entrepreneurs to rock bands to celebrity chefs. She is also the auth... View profile
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4 Comments
Post a Commentnice work angie
Great work! Happy Holidays =0)
Nicely reported. I can't get into the Skype blog at all. I was wondering if they had been hit by a DDOS attack. Best response to these is to pull the plug on the servers, which is what it looks like.
Highly informative article on the Skype outage.