14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Skype instant messaging service has once again experienced a major outage for users in several countries worldwide.
The software giant says it has already resolved the issue and Skype is working normally right now, but I’m still seeing isolated reports of users unable to connect to the service.
Specifically, users complained that chats failed to load correctly, while others said sending and receiving messages happened with major lag for all users participating in a conversation.
A number of users said they were unable to call and add people to a group chat and their message history wasn’t loading. Others said they experienced a delay of up to one hour.
Issue already resolved, not for everyone though
Microsoft confirmed on Twitter that it discovered an incident hitting the servers and acknowledged that the instant messaging feature was mostly impacted. The affected regions were Africa, Asia, Australia, Australia / Pacific, Europe, North America / Central America / Caribbean, and South America, so users living in the majority of countries likely encountered issues.
“Some users might be experiencing problems with instant messages (chat). There might be delays with sending or syncing messages,” Microsoft said.
“Thanks for the details. Our engineers are currently working on this issue, and we'd greatly appreciate your patience while we're working on it. Please refer to the same link for the update,” the official @SkypeSupport account also added in a tweet.
There are no specifics as to what may have caused the problem, but Microsoft says everything has already been resolved, so you should be able to connect to Skype normally now.
DownDetector, a service that monitors the outage of web services, confirms Skype experienced issues a few hours ago and the live outage map shows that some users might still struggle to use the instant messaging application. However, expect Skype to begin working normally for everyone shortly.