You’re looking to make a phone call, say to a friend in England from your home base in the US.  You don’t pick up the phone, do you?  Heavens no!  The phone is for animals!  If you’re smart, you simply fire up Skype and have them do likewise, then talk to your heart’s content.  Unfortunately, you probably haven’t been able to do that over the last day or so, because Skype hasn’t been working.  A major network connection failure has knocked Luxembourg-based Skype offline for over a day.

“Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype — we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations,” said a Skype spokesperson via Skype’s Twitter account.  “Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal — thanks for your continued patience.”  In a later blog post, Skype clarified the problem, which was first noticed when a large number of users dropped off the site.  “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.  Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline.”

According to the last update to the Skype Twitter page, everything is coming back online, though there are still problems.  Here’s hoping it’s back online soon, as I know a lot of folks who depend on Skype for communicating with family and friends internationally, making podcasts, and other very important things for where Google Voice is not an option.

Tags: Skype, eBay, Skype offline, Skype has gone offline, telephony, computer calling service Skype offline, voice chatting service Skype offline, network connection failure, Luxembourg, Skype knocked offline, Skype disabled by network connection failures, Skype users unable to connect

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