Millions Impacted with Skype Breakdown

If you are a Skype user who makes use of the service to earn a living or to communicate to remote users, you may be out of luck at the moment! Skype users are seriously unhappy with this second breakdown in as few as two weeks. The outage has affected millions of Skype users. While Skype is trying to pacify its users, angry messages abound on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The breakdown has caused many to blame Microsoft, who recently acquired Skype, for the problem.

Skype has become a key application on the internet. A recent study conducted indicates that Skype accounts for nearly 0.57 percent of all internet traffic. Skype has nearly 145 million users recorded as of 2010. These users have made 207 billio
Skype minutes of voice and video calls in 2010. Skype has taken over the world as a major telephone provider. In the first six months of 2010 alone, Skype to Skype logged in 6.4 billion minutes compared to the 10.7 billion minutes logged in during the whole of 2009. Clearly, Skype is a big hit amongst consumers. In the past few years Skype has become an integral part of internet businesses, particularly with startups and small internet ventures around the world. Taking these statistics into account, the productivity of this breakdown surely cannot be comprehended.

It is said that Skype is down in the Netherlands, UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Portugal, Australia, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, Croatia and Belarus. It seems, however, that there are users in the UK with a functioning Skype which means that this is not a global breakdown. The handful of affected users are spread across all parts of the globe. A statement on the company’s own web page stated that a small number of users will experience problems signing into the network. Users experiencing such difficulty will become disconnected. There are experts working around the clock to get this problem fixed, which means that there should be improvements within the next hour. Disconnected users will not have to sign in manually; instead Skype will reconnect users automatically as soon as it is possible to do so.

The breakdown has come at a time when Skype is trying to negotiate large deals with big corporations by asking for their business. Big businesses are likely to be more cautious now, as Skype has had two outages within a few weeks of each other. Analysts believe that Skype is at a turning point in its life. This turn could go either way, bringing profit, or loss, for the company. To many it seems as if Skype is looking towards the big bucks and beginning to turn away from its loyal users who have been happy to spend on its consumer products and businesses so far.

Skype is also facing major competition from several new services. These services have shown to keep pace with the latest internet telephony trends. In the age of social networks, a phenomenon such as Skype can either make or break their reputation. They need to ensure they don’t go down – even for a few minutes!