The day Skype broke…

Since well over 24 hours, Skype is kind of broken. The official word on the Skype Website is indicating that it is is caused by a problem in the “networking software” used on the central Skype servers. The update from 07h00 GMT is indicating that they are getting closer to a solution, but I guess that was before all of the european users woke up and tried to connect to the Skype network again.

Over the past few hours, I have been collecting the number of users connected to the Skpye network, and although you can see a continued growth of the number of connected users over night, it is clearly going down again now, which certainly isn’t a very good sign.

Update: over the past hour or so, the number of connected users seems to be slowly growing again. Good sign I guess.

Update (17h25BST): As the updated graph below shows, we still seem to be on the right path. More and more users are connected. Approaching the 3.5 Million user mark again.

Update (19h30BST): The number of connected users continues to grow. Although, looking at the Skype client on my PC, it is still disconnecting all the time, so there are obviously still issues.

Update (20h45BST): It is looking better and better. Over 4 million users connected agin! And my Skype client also is behaving stable again. Connected since nearly an hour now.

Update (21h35BST): We have reached 4.5 million users. Nice. But…my Skype client has started disconnecting again, so I guess it is still work in progress.

Update (22h20BST): 5 Million Users! Looking better and better…

Update (00h20BST): Not sure what to think about the latest trend on the graph. After having reached 6 million users, it dropped down again dramatically, once even down to 600’000 at 23h00GMT. Looks like a “reboot”. Well, there are no updates at all on teh Skype status pages, so no idea really. The Skype client on my machine here seems to be working fine now over the past hours, as such the drop in users might just be due to the fact that all of Europe is back to sleep now.

Update (01h45BST): The numbers look nice and stable by now, and guess what, there is also finally again an update from the guys at Skype. They basically confirm that the login problems have been solved! Although some users might still notice that parts of the whole system are behaving a bit slower then normal, the actual issue seems to be finally under control!