Skype Updates for Outage Flaw

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VoIP server provider Skype was hit with a major outage this week.

Skype first acknowledged that it was having trouble on Thursday, via a note on the Skype website indicating that a small number of users may be having problems signing into the service. At the time, Skype noted that the flaw primarily affected Skype for Windows users.

By late afternoon Thursday, Skype issued an update of its Windows client to help solve the issue.

“Earlier today, a corruption occured in a small percentage of users’ systems that resulted in some of our community not being able to sign in to Skype,” Skype spokesperson Peter Parkes wrote on the Skype blog. ” We issued some instructions which would allow you to get back online, but understand that they’re fairly technical, and have been working hard to produce a version of Skype for Windows which fixes this problem automatically.”

Skype noted that an update for Mac client was coming. According to Skype, mobile users were not affected by the flaw and as such no update or workarounds are necessary.

Linux users however were given instruction on how to perform a manual update to their client to mitigate the problem.

Skype is now in the process of being acquired by Micrsoftin a deal valued at $8.5 billion.

Skype has since made moves that have raised the ire of those in the open source community about the continued support of Skype on Linux and open source platforms. Among the first victims is the Asterisk Open Source PBX, which previously had a partnership with Skype. As of July 26th, Skype will no longer be supporting Asterisk.

This week’s Skype outage was the second major outage of Skype in the last six months. At the end of December 2010, Skype suffered a major outage during the critical holiday period. The December outage was a significantly broader issue than the current sign-in problem, which only affected some users. Back in December, Skype blamed a ‘supernode’ failure as the reason for the outage.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.