Skype Users Hit by 14-Hour Outage

New York, Aug 21: Internet phone service Skype restored service after a routine software upgrade which left millions of users detached since last week. The service which is currently owned by eBay, restored service on last Saturday and explained the breakdown on Monday on its Website.

"The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," the company said on its blog.

The high number of restarts revealed a bug in its network resource software, preventing a "self-healing" function of its software from working, the company said.

Skype said no malicious activities caused the problem.

Skype, founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, uses peer-to-peer technology to connect phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users. It runs on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, PocketPC and Linux.

Besides computer-to-computer calls, Skype users can also use the program to connect to cell phones and traditional land line telephones.

Because of the breakdown the Indian users of Skype also faced several problems.

OneIndia News>