Skype outage - is the worst over?

Stephen Withers
Friday, 17 August 2007 08:33

Business IT - Technology

Skype's engineering team has apparently made some progress with the issue that prevented logging into the service as there are over two million users online as of this writing, though the company's Heartbeat status page is still showing problems with login.

Information about the nature of problem remains sketchy. A statement on the Skype home page dispels any suggestion that the   system had crashed or fallen victim to a cyber attack - "We love our customers too much to let that happen," said Villu Arak.

"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."

According to a New York Times report, Skype engineers said the flaw existed in every copy of the client software.

What the company hasn't yet explained is why this potential problem suddenly became real.