It appears that Skype crushed itself under its own weight today with reports of up to 20 million users unable to sign in to the VoIP/Text/Video/Audio chat service. They have been the world up to date with a series of Tweets, but that didn’t last long as Twitter went down. Coincidence?
Yes.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t stir up the tech conspiracy theorists out there. Twitter just received $200 million in funding. Skype is working towards a $100 million IPO. Facebook is trying to buy Yahoo! to…
Okay, so we made the last one up.
Skype’s most recent Tweet indicates that things are on their way back to normal but it will likely take hours before it is back to normal. What does this mean for Skype’s future? It is probably a good thing that it happened, exposing issues with their infrastructure now as the service grows in users. Their official blog post regarding the issue says they have been using “supernodes” to handle the flow of information and that today was a collapse of many of them as a result.
Their solution: “Mega Supernodes”. What that means is up to speculation, but no matter what it is it’s likely a positive for it to happen now.