Scoop has an Ethical Paywall
Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic
Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic
Millions of people around the globe have been hit by an outage at the popular internet phone service Skype.
Users as far afield as Japan, Europe and the US have all reported problems.
The company which prides itself on providing relatively reliable service last suffered a major outage in 2007.
"We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience users are having," Tony Bates, Skype chief executive officer told BBC News.
"Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation," Mr Bates said.
On Skype's Twitter account, the company said their "engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal".
The news blog ReadWriteWeb said they have monitored complaints from users who reported that they are unable to log into the service and that the programme is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC.
Mr Bates did not rule in or rule out the possibility of a malicious attack and said "all avenues" were being explored.
ENDS
Scoop
Scoop Independent News
Scoop is NZ's largest independent news source; respected widely in media, political, business and academic circles for being the place on the internet for publishing "what was really said", and for the quality of its analysis of issues.
Gordon Campbell: On The Coalition’s Awful, Not Good, Very Bad Poll Results
Ian Powell: Policy Vacuum Enables For-profit Corporate General Practice Ownership By Stealth
Gordon Campbell: On Iran Killing Its Rappers, And Searching For The Invisible Dr. Reti
Peter Dunne: MPs Unusually Quiet On Pay Rise
Ian Powell: Cuba And New Zealand: A Relationship Worthy Of Strengthening
Gordon Campbell: On bird flu, AUKUS entry fees and Cindy Lee