UK Suffers Major Skype Outage

Skype users across the UK were left without access to their accounts this morning following what appears to be a major outage impacting the rest of the world too.

Microsoft’s VoIP and instant messaging platform  stopped working earlier through this morning, leaving users unable to log in to their accounts and send or receive messages.

As it stands, the service is still down, with Skype’s engineers reportedly working on a fix.

“We are working hard to fix an issue which is preventing some users from logging in and using Skype. We apologise for any inconvenience and will keep our users updated,” a Microsoft spokesperson told TechWeekEurope.

Issue

“Some of you may experience problems with Skype presence and may not see online. We have detected an issue with the status settings of Skype,” company spokesman Leonas Sendrauskas wrote in a Skype blog post.

Claiming that “Instant messages are still being delivered as usual”, Sendrauskas said that the status issue does not affect Skype for Web, which can be used to make calls and send instant messages.

“We’re working on a fix for this issue and hope to have an update for you soon,” he added. “Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused while we get this resolved.”

Microsoft bought Skype for £5.1 billion in 2011 and replaced its consumer chat service Windows Live Messenger last year, offering a range of new services including translation tools for speech and text.

The company recently unveiled Skype for Business, an updated version of the program specifically targeting enterprise customers featuring instant messaging, presence and voice calls, and integrated video calling functions.

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