Skype Usage Surges as 27 Million People Chat Simultaneously

It seems that Skype not only landed on its feet, but actually picked up some steam after the massive outage of a couple of weeks ago. Not too long ago, Skype managed to reach 27 million concomitant users, about two million more than its previous record. One culprit for this may be the recent launch of the video-chat capable iPhone app, but it probably isn't the only source of growth.

Skype's peak usage hovered around 25 million users, a number it reached back in November. Since then, the figure has been holding steady, until a few hours ago when Skype broke through the 26 million mark and the 27 million mark in quick succession.

At its peak, almost 27,3 million people were using Skype at the same time. Considering the type of heavy-duty traffic video and voice calls generate, you can imagine that all those users are eating up quite a bit of resources.

Thankfully, Skype's peer-to-peer underlying technology means that most of the grunt is bared by the client software itself rather than Skype's servers.

But that can also be a weakness, as Skype's meltdown in late December highlighted. A number of problems exaggerated by the way Skype works culminated into an almost complete lack of service for some 24 hours.

With 27 million people at the same time trying to use the service, it's clear that any issues affecting Skype will be felt around the world. Skype recovered from the outage and started 2011 very strongly.

It acquired the mobile video call technology provider Qik very recently and also introduced an updated its iPhone app to support video calls, competing with Apple's own Face Time.

The mobile space seems to be booming and video calls seem to be taking off this time around. Again, Apple seems to have made the right bet with it introduced its technology along with the iPhone 4. If mobile video calls do become very popular, Skype is very well positioned to be a key player in that market.