Skype offline until Friday

The popular VoIP application "Skype" may be offline as long as 24 hours.

Skype offline until Friday Millions of "Skype" users woke up today to a gray icon on their screens. According to Skype Ltd., division of eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY), a software problem is to blame for the outage, which could last well into Friday. A message on the home page of Skype read: Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours.

According to Skype, the engineers are working on the problem and people should keep the application running, as they would be automatically logged in as soon as the problem is resolved. The outage, although inconvenient to many users, would hardly steer anyone away from the service. At any time there are 5-6 million people logged in, for a total of over 220 million accounts, and the last time Skype went offline was in 2005.

Skype was launched in August of 2003 and was co-founded by Niklas Zennström, who previously headed up the Kazaa file sharing service. The auction powerhouse eBay Inc. bought Skype Technologies (back then the company was based in Luxemburg) on October 14th of 2005 in a $2.6 billion cash and stock deal.

Published on 08/16/2007