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Skype Error Shuts Down Entire Phone Service, Uh-Oh Problem

By: Daniel Chubb | August 17, 2007 | 3 Comments

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The very popular and free online telephone service Skype, was down for the best part of Thursday, leaving a few users, roughly 220 million of them (including small businesses that had given up their landlines) without a way to call anyone. I suppose that’s the price we pay for moving forward in technology and relying so much on the internet.

“There is a chance this could go on beyond tomorrow, but it’s our hope that it’s going to be resolved,” Kurt Sauer, Skype’s chief security officer said. “What happened today was caused by a unique set of events, the genesis of which is not entirely understood.”

“We have a good track record about uptime,” said Mr. Sauer. “That doesn’t help people who were down today, but we are working every moment to recover from this issue and not to let it occur again. We want to get it fixed quickly and ensure that we are what we always said we were — a highly reliable, resistant network.”

Were you affected by the Skype outage? What do you think of Skype’s problem?

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  • ada

    Glad to know that there are many good alternatives to Skype like http://www.jaja.com and http://www.zoippe.com

  • Rodney Jackson

    Yes, somewhat, but I haven’t been so stupid as not to have an alternative system to back up what is basically a free system, so cut Skype some slack.
    Also, your quote of 220 million users being stranded is way off target! 220m is almost certainly the number of downloads or thereabouts. Also, 9m is the highest number I’ve ever seen online at one time, and some of those will not be online all the time. I would estimate less than 100m users have been affected.
    I did have some downtime, but most of the time I have had some sort of connection. During this “crisis” I made an acceptable SkypeOut call to a US cell phone roaming in Central America.

    R

  • tom kunau

    hey–Ive been a very happy subscriber of SKYPE for over 2 years now!! Their service has been equal to or exceeded any landline company ive ever had. What few issues ive had have always been resolved to my satisfaction. When there are issues (few) i just think of the times when i had no landline for some reason–storm, accident or whatever!!! So give them a break!! Who’s perfect?? Are you?? :-) )