Skype Takes Another Hit, Drops ‘Small Number’ of Users

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What goes down must eventually come back up. That would’ve been Newton’s fourth law had he lived another 284 years and been using Skype this morning.

“Skype broken for everyone?” wrote Xona Games’ game producer Matthew Doucette on Twitter this morning. I glanced up at my Mac’s menu bar. Sure enough, the dreaded X-Cloud (or “X-in-a-cloud,” you pick) icon. Thank goodness I didn’t need Skype this morning. I’m only covering the E3 2011 games conference in California, haphazardly interviewing game types who live and die by the service. No biggie.

Or okay, yeah, a biggie, though Skype says it’s a “configuration problem” that’s only affecting “a small number of users” and promises to fix the issue—whatever it is—pronto.

“We’ve identified the cause of the problem, and have begun to address it,” said Skype’s Peter Parkes on the company blog. “If you’ve been affected, you should start to see improvement in the next hour or so. You shouldn’t need to manually sign back in to Skype – it should reconnect automatically when it’s able to do so.”

And in an update to the post, Parkes adds:

We are continuing to address today’s problems, and are seeing indications that the situation is improving.

If you were disconnected from Skype earlier, you shouldn’t need to manually sign back in to Skype – it should reconnect automatically when it’s able to do so.

We apologise for the disruption to your conversations.

This makes the second bump I’ve experienced with Skype in the last few weeks. At the end of May, I had the problem where each time I’d sign into Skype it’d crash. The company released a hotfix to address that one on May 27th.

And would you look at that: Skype’s just come back as I typed that last sentence. All of which means—fingers crossed—that you should be back, too.