Updated: Skype Outage Easing; Fix Now Available
Such is life in the clouds: the occasional thunderstorms illustrate how tenuous it all can be. The silver lining for Skype Thursday is that people have come to rely on its services so much that they freak out when it goes down.
Skype acknowledged an outage earlier in the day that appears to have been related to a Skype upgrade pushed to Windows users overnight. Skype users flooded Twitter and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) searching for more information about the outage, which is still affecting quite a few people but appears to be easing.
Those still having problems can follow instructions posted by Skype on how to remove a particular file from their systems that should get everything back up and running, although the company also promised to release a fix that doesn’t require file management from those who may be intimidated by such things. (It’s really not hard.)
Skype is no stranger to occasional outages, as is the case with many companies that offer cloud-computing services, but this appears to have been the first problem since Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) announced plans to purchase the company for $8.5 billion.
Updated 3:00 p.m. PT: Without explaining what caused the outage beyond acknowledging a “corruption,” Skype updated its corporate blog later on Thursday to point Windows users toward a new version of its software that should fix any remaining problems.
Ironic that Microsoft buys Skype, then it seems that a Windows 7 overnight update is the cause of today’s Skype outage. Gotta see the humor in that, really. My Skype still down.
I should have made that a little clearer, there were some anecdotal reports that a new version of Skype for Windows was causing problems, not a Windows update itself. I’ll tweak the wording a bit.
Imagine the fuss if it was something other than Windows …
Skype’s own website says: “A small number of you may have had problems signing in to Skype. This predominantly affects people using Skype for Windows. We have identified the problem and will issue a fix in the next few hours.”
Their fix didn’t work for me: http://heartbeat.skype.com/2011/05/problems_signing_into_skype_an.html