August 2007

Hello all,

As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.

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.

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.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.

As always, you can find the latest information on the Heartbeat pages.

From Sten over at the main blog at 7am:

Hey,

Even though it is too early to call out anything definite yet we are now seeing signs of improvement in our sign-on performance. We continue to monitor the situation through Europe waking up this morning and have more for you in approximately 4 hours.

My client is now occasionally bringing in stacks of unread multichats. Hope yours too.

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the delay, but we can now update you on the Skype sign-on issue.  As we continue to work hard at resolving the problem, we wanted to dispel some of the concerns that you may have. The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software.  This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network. 

Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible.

Some of you may be having problems logging in to 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 apologise for the inconvenience.

For the latest updates, please see the Heartbeat page on this issue.

Engaget published an interview with Richard Branson the other day, in which he had some promising things to say about VoIP on planes:

If somebody really wants to talk to somebody, we might well have a couple of rows at the back where people can go and make a call there. We wouldn't really want to have people talking next to each other, but a place on the plane where people can make a call if they really wanted to, if we had VoIP, then that might be possible.

I can't imagine they'd section off part of the cabin in today's world of seat revenue chasing, but a plane with Skype in every seat would be even better.

It's a shame that Connexion by Boeing got axed before I had a chance to try it out, but according to Chris Pirillo and Vincent Brousseau Skype worked like a dream.

Maybe SRB can make it happen again...

Once again, Lars Plougmann comes up with the goods, with this beautiful photo of baby video conferencing.

Two years on, has the baby phone materialised?

Good news for those of you calling India — the 50% off promotion has been extended to the end of August.

Whether you're calling from Birmingham to Bangalore, Portsmouth to Pune, or Manchester to Mirat, you can make calls to Indian landlines for 4.7p per minute excluding VAT, which works out at just over 5.2p per minute including VAT.

All you need to do is grab some Skype credit and get calling

If you've never made a call from your computer before, don't worry — we've put together a guide to show you how.