Skype users worldwide victim to mysterious crash

Skype appears to have suffered a significant and bizarre crash, with users worldwide reporting problems on Twitter.

Not long after the company has announced a major deal with Microsoft it has become victim to unspecified problems, with some reports of the programme shutting down with a Windows error message.

Twitter is now seeing floods of angry messages by users who have been booted of the system and are now unable to login or even start up the Skype programme itself.

An error message appears on Skype and users are not able to even get to the next log-in screen.

Much of the vitriol is aimed at Microsoft, with one user tweeting: “Major worldwide Skype crash, thanks Microsoft!”.

We have no idea what the problem is. But Skype has suffered from unexplained outages before. Our C. Shanti reports from December last year.

Skype is also leaving behind Asterisk, with a letter circulated that the contract with Digium, the firm behind Asterisk, has now been terminated.

This is expected to come into effect as of July 26, meaning that Digium will no longer be able to supply Skype for Asterisk to its customers. Product Manager Mark Amick stating that he is "extremely disappointed with Skype's decision". 

Skype's heartbeat status page says everything is fine at time of publication, with the most recent update post explaining about price changes to calls in Libya and Colombia.

Update: Skype's servers are screwed. There is a notice online which says: "Hi, our server has taken a short break

"Looks like our server is down. This usually means that we're doing maintenance work or there are too many visitors at skype.com and we cannot cope with the popularity. In any case — we're already fixing it and everything should be back to normal in a few minutes."

What's happened here then? Not much or has Skype been hit badly? Somewhere in Redmond, someone is sweating...

Update 2: Thanks to commenter Rael, who mentions Skype's quick-fix post at heartbeat.skype.com.

Update 3: A representative from Skype said not able to confirm anything other than it is not any sort of attack and that it is only "affecting small numbers of people" but is unable to give any more details.

Read more: http://www.techeye.net/internet/skype-users-worldwide-victim-to-mysterious-crash#ixzz1NUBinqGP