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Quote:Skype users in Colombia, Brazil, Germany, Finland and the United States were among the countries unable to use Skype on Thursday, according to reports. What may be most interesting of all to determine will be the impact of the outage on Skype's own employees, who rely on the service themselves for their work communications...

A software problem at Skype left many users of the popular VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service unable to log in or make calls Thursday, and with little hope for relief until Friday, the company said.

"Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype," the company wrote on its support blog at about 2 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, or about 10 a.m. Eastern U.S. Daylight time, on Thursday. "Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours...

Quote:We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours...

Quote:And in this moment of crisis, eBay’s senior management was AWOL. Ebay and Skype management are happy to talk to the press when delivering the good news, but in this crisis situation, the silence was deafening.

Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, and other Skype management made no statement, gave no assurances to their community, leaving their PR agency and the blog to keep people informed. Of course, this led to even more speculation, rumors and innuendoes...

Quote:In an update to users on Skype's Heartbeat blog, employee Villu Arak said the disruption was not because of hackers or any other malicious activity.

"The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update,'' he wrote in the message, which was posted at 0535 GMT.

"The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact,'' he said in the posting...