Worldwide Skype outage

If you're like me and work in an office, when you noticed yesterday that you couldn't connect to Skype, you assumed that IT had changed something in your firewall's configuration that was preventing the connection, despite the fact that Skype is able to overcome almost any such issues. Since I didn't try to use Skype from home, this assumption that the problem was local continued for me when I couldn't connect Skype this morning.

As it turns out, this inability to connect as actually due to a Skype outage worldwide. According to a post yesterday to Skype's Heartbeat blog, through which Skype provides service status information:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.

As of now, I am still unable to log in. The latest post to the Heartbeat blog this morning says:

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.

An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. 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.

For status updates, stay tuned to Heartbeat. Skype says that you can leave Skype open and you will be logged in as soon as the problems are resolved.

Update 8/18/07, 11:00 AM ET: I just tried to sign in to Skype again, and was successful.