Many Skype users unable to make calls by Delia Cruceru

Thursday, millions of users of the popular computer program were unable to log in. Users from Germany, Brazil, Vietnam and United States all faced problems and reported difficulties in logging on. The company declared: "Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours." Rumours were saying that Skype was the victim of hacking or that the system crashed, but Skype denied those speculations reporting that the problem was "a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user's own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network." Today users from Europe, Asia or United Stated were able to log in to the free service and make long distance calls. Skype said that "even though it is too early to call out anything definite yet we are now seeing signs of improvement in our sign-on performance." With a total of 220 million of accounts and almost 5 or 6 millions of users connected to the service at the same time, Skype is a revolutionary computer program founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, which uses peer-to-peer technology to connect phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users. Skype can run on computers using Windows, Mac OS X, PocketPC orLinux.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070816/ap_on_hi_te/germany_skype_outage;_ylt=AnYbo90QnWUtdln0mFFrUhSs0NUE

by Delia Cruceru for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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