Skype: Millions still without service
The Internet telephony company is still having trouble restoring service to all of its users as its massive outage continues into a second day.
Skype is still working to right itself from a major outage that began yesterday.
The company said earlier this morning that about 5 million people were able to access its Internet telephony service, and "that number is increasing all the time." The only issue is, that figure puts total use at about 30 percent of its normal amount.
Skype then followed that posting up with another this morning, saying that it's seeing "evidence of a significant increase in the number of people online." It currently estimates that 10 million people are using its service, which would still potentially mean millions of users are shut out. As of this writing, the Skype program on my Mac, which is working properly, claims over 8 million people are online.
In either case, the number of users online is still much lower than it would be if everything was working properly.
Even as the situation improves, users should expect some hiccups: "Please note that some features may not work as reliably as expected--peoples' online status may be slow to update, and instant messages might not be delivered as quickly as they are normally. Group video calling will take longer to return to normal," Skype said.
"We're sincerely sorry for this disruption," Skype wrote on its blog today. "Like you, all of us at Skype rely on Skype every day."
Skype's massive outage started yesterday. At the time, the company said that several of its "supernodes" went down, causing the service to become inaccesible for millions of users. It expected to have the service running normally within "a few hours" of that announcement. It then said yesterday afternoon that Skype was "now returning to normal." It seems that at least so far, those claims were a bit premature.
We will continue to share details here as we learn more.