Now for the moment that we’ve all been waiting for. Many of us have speculated about the different reasons that Skype went down last week. Some said that it was caused by Russian Hackers, but Skype came out to deny this.

Skype needed to answer the world, though. If you read the Heartbeat blog today, you will see their official statement:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.

Sounds like people need to modify their default Windows Update settings. Or do you all think that this is a cover-up answer? Interested in hearing your thoughts on this one.

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I’ve been following Skype’s progress very closely over the past 24 hours, and according to their blog, Villu Arak reports:

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.

Vilu goes on to speak to all of the speculation going on for this extended outage:

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 any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

I’m glad that Skype has made an attempt to dispell myths that have been circulating.

On my end (as of 10:30am EST), I’ve finally been able to have my first successful Skype messaging back up! Very happy to see the service running again - didn’t realize how dependent people are on it. Everyone else back up and running? Let me know!

After I mentioned that Skype was down in my previous post, lots of people started commenting in, telling where they were not able to see Skype as well.

So, I put together a handy Google Map showing all the people that wrote in. It was really something to see where everyone has been commenting from! Interestingly, nobody was in the Southern Hemisphere yet:

Many of you may have noticed that Skype is not working. According to the Skype Blog:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: 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.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.

As of 11:20am EST, Skype is still not working. I’ve seen it appear to be connected, but no users show up as online. Hope that they will be up soon!

Boy, they start young on the computer these days

As I’m winding down the day here, my 4 year old sat at the computer today and started blasting me with Skype IM’s. Like this:

Couldn’t resist sharing this one!