Skype Suffers Outage: What You Need to Know

Reports have been circulating today that Skype is suffering from a global outage. Skype is investigation the issue and working on a mend, simply in in the meantime many users or so the world are unable to connect with Skype.

Given the culture of hacktivism that is evolving on the Internet, my first thought was that peradventure Skype is the victim of some sort of denial of service (DoS) attack as a recoil for shunning the open seed residential district with the decision to force the plug on support for Asterisk. Sony, and companies that worked against Wikileaks know only too wellspring that hacktivists can be a force to be reckoned with.

In that location are some users on the Internet blaming the outage along…wait for IT–Microsoft. I am not sure if the conspiracy theory is that Microsoft is somehow flat responsible for the outage, or if the tinfoil hats just think that Microsoft's intended skill of Skype has drawn the ire of anti-Microsoft hackers. Either way, Microsoft doesn't own Skype yet, doesn't master Skype trading operations, and doesn't pull any strings at Skype, so the Microsoft-bashing angle is silly.

As it turns out, though, the outage appears to be much smaller than recommended, and not as nefarious as I had assumed. A Skype blog post explains, "A small issue of you may make had problems signing in to Skype. This preponderantly affects people victimisation Skype for Windows. We have identified the problem and will issue a muddle in the next few hours."

Eastern Samoa the blog place states, Skype is working pushing out a fix, but in the in the meantime, Skype provides instructions in the blog post for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users to manually decide the issue and bugger off atomic number 75-connected with Skype. For Windows users, the instructions amount to shutting down Skype, removing an XML filing cabinet called "distributed", and restarting Skype.

For most affected users, this is little more than an inconvenience. But, there are some businesses that rely on Skype as a primary means of communication (hence the backlash over dropping support for Star). Many businesses likewise utilize Skype as a means of cost-effective video conferencing.

The Skype outage illustrates one of the primary challenges of relying along cloud-founded services–sometimes the cloud isn't there.