Skype Down

Internet telephone service Skype left millions of users out in the cold Wednesday, as a problem with its connection system prevented people from signing in.

Skype engineers are working on the problem, the company said. Skype says a problem with some versions of Skype took a bunch of supernodes down, meaning that people weren’t able to log on as normal.

Skype was down for millions of users today. Initially, Skype engineers weren’t sure what the problem was and directed users to monitor @Skype on Twitter for updates.



According to Skype, the outage was due to some of their “supernodes” being unavailable because “many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype.” Skype works as a distributed network, this is why some users had no problems and others were unable to login. Key pieces of the network failed, effectively blocking users across the globe.

As Om points out, a peer-to-peer network like Skype shouldn’t really go down.