Skype gradually returns to normal

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Budi Putra in Business, Featured, Tech

Skype is currently down for millions of users (yeah, up to 20 million users) — its first *major* interruption since 2007.  CEO Tony Bates told BBC News that the service now is gradually returning to normal.

“Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation.”

Tip for user: If you’re logged in, don’t log out – Skype should now be running for you.

Skype explains more insight on what happened today:

Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.

Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.

What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations. Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal.

[image source]

Skype, the next cash machine?

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Budi Putra in Featured, Tech

Skype, the Internet telephony company with has 560 million registered users (biggger than Facebook’s so far!), announced that it has filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $100 million.

Skype’s decision to go public is a result of the company turning into a cash machine. It currently has 560 million registered users and about 124 million of them are active on monthly basis, while about 8.1 million of them are monthly paying users — who on average pay $96 a year for the service. Any increase in the number of average monthly paying users is going to help the company erase any losses and goose up its revenues.

[via GigaOM]

Skype, still the world’s biggest social network

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech

My colleague Jeremy Wagstaff wrote an interesting piece on Skype and highlighted that the service is still the world’s biggest social network! [To be honest, I was also not aware about this fact!]

We talk about Facebook, twitter, MySpace and Friendster as the big social networks but we keep forgetting one that is far bigger than that: Skype. This from a Bloomberg piece on Skype’s vacillating fortunes:

Skype has soared in popularity since it started in 2003 and has about 548 million users worldwide—more than Facebook, MySpace and Twitter combined.