Skype issues affecting people’s ability to make and receive calls

21 Sep 2015

International communications are facing a slowdown today as Skype is reporting major issues with its networks resulting in many people showing up as being offline when they aren’t and calls not going through.

The Skype issues are believed to have begun sometime this morning resulting in a series of outages or difficulties connecting, but not across its entire service.

Releasing a statement online, Skype’s online support service Heartbeat confirmed the outage at 11am UTC, when it said that users are currently unable to change their online status, which has meant some calls can’t be made.

Other issues being reported by the Microsoft-owned service include difficulties in signing in to Skype in the first place, with slow responses to any changes made to account information.

While originally being reported in a few countries, including the UK, Japan and Australia, it now appears that it is a near-global issue, with users here in Ireland reporting the fault also.

Skype have yet to give any comment outside of the one posted at 11am this morning, which said: “We’re doing everything we can to fix this issue and hope to have another update for you soon. Thank you for your patience as we work to get this incident resolved.”

Safe to say, many people are not happy.

Skype screen image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com