Skype Is Down, Nearly 20 Million Lost Their Connection This Morning

Popular voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) client Skype appears to be down for millions of users this morning and Twitter is abuzz with complaints. Complaints vary from users saying they are unable to log into the service to saying that the program is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC.

So, if you woke up this morning to call your family for the holidays or to get in touch with your business contacts and found yourself unable, you certainly are not alone.

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We have watched the number of users online drop over the past hour from more than 21 million online to a current low of 12.5 million. That’s around 8 million people that just dropped off the service and some of them are going to Twitter to try to ferret out the problem.

Update: The number of users online has continued to drop, as just over 10 million users are on the service now. According to Peter Parkes, communications lead with Skype, the problem is with logging into the service. “If you’re already signed in, you should be able to continue using Skype as normal,” said Parkes.

Update #2: As the morning has gone on, more users have lost their connection bringing the total to around 20 million. When we first noticed the issue at around 8 am PST, there were more than 21 million using the service. The latest we had before getting booted was just under 2 million users online. Skype has said that it has identified the problem and is working on a fix.

The complaints on Twitter don’t appear to be in any one language or region and Skype’s Twitter account is silent on the subject so far. We gave Skype-to-Skype voice calling a quick try and it worked just fine, as does group text chatting. The problems don’t appear to be universal, but several ReadWriteWeb staff have reported that the Skype app keeps crashing or that they are unable to use it entirely.

Parkes offered the following statement:

Some people may have problems signing in to Skype at the moment. We’re investigating – apologies for the disruption. People can follow @skype on Twitter for updates.

Parkes said that he didn’t have any additional information on why the service was unavailable for some users, but that engineers are looking into it.

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