Skype's Downtime Affects Millions, Delays Podcast

As many of you know by now, Skype has been having login issues since Thursday afternoon. The popular VOIP service, which has 220 million users worldwide, has been down intermittently all day, and although the company is working around the clock to fix it, it's still not back up 100%.

Skype officials say that despite rumors, "neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way." Rather, the problem is with a login algorithm that apparently affects all versions of Skype since its release. No word yet on why it suddenly became a problem yesterday, though.

What does this mean for businesses and others who rely on Skype? Well, for starters, it means our delicious podcast will not be available until Tuesday, as we rely on Skype for our audio conferencing and recording. Although the problems are mostly worked out - most of us have been able to log in intermittently at least - "we're not out of the woods yet," as Skype's Villu Arak writes. For others, especially the increasing number of small businesses who use Skype exclusively, the downtime may mean lost productivity and profits.

For more information on this, the New York Times has a few articles, and of course keep watching Skype's Heartbeat blog for updates from the team themselves.

Don't forget to tune in Tuesday for the podcast!

Update 5:10 PDT:  Skype says the situation is mostly resolved.