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Skype Won't Connect

Skype Won't Connect - Internet telephone service Skype left millions of users out in the cold Wednesday, as a problem with its connection system prevented people from signing in.

The number of users on the service, which spun off from eBay last year, began falling earlier today — something that isn’t “typical or expected,” the company said in an official blog post. Technology blog ReadWriteWeb said the drop was significant: Numbers went from about 21 million to about 10 million.

Skype engineers are working on the problem, the company said. But the fix may take “a few hours,” and advanced features like video calling might not be available until after that.

Skype Won't Connect

Downtime is a potentially huge problem for Internet services like Skype, which have made an effort to convince users that they’re as stable as traditional carriers. The service is known for being relatively reliable, with its last major outage in August 2007, reported Digits colleague Ben Rooney at Tech Europe.

So what went wrong? The company says the problem has to do with its “supernodes” — a crucial part of its peer-to-peer networking system. Almost any computer in the network can be a Skype supernode, and these act like directories for the service, telling Skype things like who is online. Skype says a problem with some versions of Skype took a bunch of supernodes down, meaning that people weren’t able to log on as normal.

Skype Won't Connect
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