Skype Outage Hits Users Worldwide 167
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that millions of Skype phone users worldwide couldn't make calls or were dropped in mid-conversation because of a network connection failure that began about 9 AM Wednesday PST. 'For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of,' says Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. 'Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide.' In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology, shouldn't see an outage, but that is not really the case — the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. 'The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business,' writes Om Malik. 'If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage.'"
Re:gee.. (Score:5, Informative)
It's still ongoing right now, albeit intermittently. I'm seeing drop-outs on the distribution of my skype status (despite my local 'net connection being fine).
Skypenames2.exe - In case you're wondering... (Score:4, Informative)
Halfway through yesterday my Skype stopped working, just like everybody else's.
It then tried to reconnect, and out of the blue gave me a pop-up saying "Skypenames2.exe wants to use Skype" with the options "Allow access" or "Deny access."
This naturally set off a few alarm bells, but as it turns out it isn't malware or a virus, just a poorly named Skype component. It allows you to click telephone links in IE or a Mozilla-based browser and make direct phone calls using Skype. Personally I don't want or need that kind of integration, so I declined.