Tech Shout!

Users of Skype, the Internet-based telephone and message service in several countries worldwide were reportedly facing problems logging on to the service. It now appears that the problem was a software related one, and hence engineers were forced to shut down the system for over 24 hours.

Due to this, many of the 220 million Skype users were unable to sign in their ‘beloved’ IM and VoIP for several hours after the outage was reported on Thursday this week.

Skype even acknowledged on its Web site that there was a problem. Additionally, in order to prevent any further problems, the Skype Team also disabled downloads of the program.

Here is what the company wrote on its support blog at around 2p.m. Greenwich Mean Time or 10a.m. Eastern US Daylight Time on Thursday: “Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Skype expects its service to be up and running within the next 12 to 24 hours.

The post of the Skype support blog now reads: “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.”

Besides, there is also a post signed by Villu Arak dismissed some of the theories about the possible cause which led to the Skype outage.

The post reads: “Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor was any form of attack related to the current sign-on issues in any way.”

Also in an earlier post Villu Arak blamed an algorithm for Skype’s outage.

He explained on the support blog: “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.”

What remains to be seen is the main cause of Skype’s outage. Until then, we will just have to believe that it was merely a software bug!