Skype outage! Everybody panic!

Popular VoIP provider Skype has been having server issues, they’ve confirmed on their blog.

The service, which many small businesses and general people in the world use in lieu of traditional landlines, experienced difficulties with users signing in sometime around noon EST. The outage didn’t affect users already signed in, and Skype kept subscribers abreast on Twitter and their blog regarding the downtime:

We’re having some problems with our sign in server, so you may not be able to sign in to the Skype application or to your account as normal.

[2009/01/21@1746UTC] If you’re already signed in to the Skype application on your computer or mobile phone, you should be able to call/IM/etc as normal. This is only affecting people who aren’t already signed in.

As soon as I have more information, I’ll update this post.

[2009/01/21@1752UTC] Our forums are experiencing heavy traffic and so access may be slower than usual. Apologies! For more updates, watch this space or follow @skype on Twitter.

[2009/01/12@2002UTC] We’ve made some changes which should improve things. Stand by!

Just before 4pm EST, Skype tweeted that things were getting back to normal and promised to fill users in on the details shortly:

Everything should be returning to normal now – we’re very sorry about what happened today. We’ll publish a more detailed explanation soon.

A quick search on Twitter indicates some users are still reporting sign-in difficulties as well as intermittent disconnection. (I wonder if they notice they’ve got the wrong year in their blog post about the outage?)

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