Skype still down for some, 'on the road to recovery'

Noticed that you haven't been able to make any Skype calls lately? Don't worry: It's not you, it's them. As we briefly mentioned, the VoIP service went down yesterday leaving millions of Skype users unable to log in. At the time, the company predicted "12 to 24 hours" of downtime without mentioning the nature of the problem, causing the Internet to run rampant with speculation. Was it hackers? A server overload?

Turns out, it's nothing quite so exciting. In a post to the Skype corporate blog, company spokesperson Villu Arak described the outage as resulting from a glitch in one of the company's networking algorithms. "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. Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock--from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose--to resume normal service as quickly as possible." Early this morning, Arak delivered an update reporting that progress is being made. "We're on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day. An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we're not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday."

For up-to-date reports on Skype's status:
- check the company's blog