14 DAY TRIAL // Skype, one of the most popular, if not the most popular instant messaging and VoIP client on the planet, is currently down for many users. With the size of Skype's audience, even though the problem doesn't affect everyone, it's a massive issue.
As per usual, people have taken to Twitter to voice their frustration. While the collective grumblings of thousands of people won't get Skype working any faster, Twitter is always the best place to check out what's the latest collective digital hurdle and probably the fastest way to know if a service is down or just not working for you.
"Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations," Skype acknowledged on its Twitter account.
Users are reporting problems signing in, like Skype is saying, or random crashes. For some, Skype is working partially, but some of its features are inaccessible. The problems don't affect all users and Skype isn't seeing a complete outage.
Skype Heartbeat, the official status monitor of the service is not reporting any major issues. The last problem on Heartbeat is from December 16. Sign ins are reported as having problems though. A good indication that something is up though is the fact that the status page is loading very slowly.
Skype doesn't have a track record of significant outages, making the problem worse in the eyes of its users. In fact, the last time it experienced any significant large scale problems was a few years ago when it was still under eBay's supervision.
This time around, the issues may be affecting as many as 8 million people. Read Write Web reports that the number of users online dropped sharply from 21 million to 12.5 million in about 30 minutes.