That's Skype, the P2P network
Or, it was...
Microsoft-owned video chat service Skype has 'fessed up to a major outage affecting its customers, promising it is "working on a quick fix" to the problem. The problem appeared to start just after 9am BST. In a statement the company said: We have detected an issue with the status settings of Skype. Affected users will not be …
I use QQ now on Windows, I'm more comfortable being spied on by China than NSA and GCHQ as I'm not Chinese. Sadly doesn't work on Linux (ironically Skype works better on Linux than Windows!). There is always email and IRC if it's just text chat rather than voice or video. QQ video has better features too.
>"(mostly because of the legal intercept limitations in a P2P environment)"
"legal"? WTF?
Did you REALLY, SERIOUSLY mean to imply that the greater relative difficulty of ILLEGAL interception bore ABSOLUTELY NO weight in the decision for NSAFT to buy and "re-implement" Skype with the P2P architecture and cryptography both conspicuously subverted?
>"(mostly because of the intercept limitations in a P2P environment)"
There... FTFY O:)
>> So instant messaging NOT being delivered... <<
When it first fell over, I thought the same.
I can't apparently log on either. I can't see the status of my contacts - they all show as offline. However, I can double click the contact and IM as normal, despite this.
HTH
A colleague and I just tried Skype Web and it failed to connect a voice call.
That may be due to Mac/PC reasons rather than Skype reasons though.
(NB You can't even try to make calls from Chrome on Mac, you have to use Safari. I never tried it before to know if it should work or not.)
Someone is getting fired over this!
Not just you.
But be grateful El Reg is not asking punters for personalised stories, "email us if you were there", and "tell us how gutted you were so our readers can empathise and experience by proxy because we do not have any reporters there and even if we did their editorials are pathetic" a la Auntie Beeb.
And the other screenshots are of tw...that would sound too sexist, when I'm trying to point out the sexism as well as agreeing with the lack of originality--the sexism will bring the clicks, we males have been conditioned to do some of our 'thinking'--never mind. The point is made, or I should be shot. Probably both.
Maybe some n00b engineer decided to run software updates on a critical server, borking something in the process. Or it could be some spammah/pornbot throwing a hissy fit because I've told her off because of her small titties....
We use a Polycom video conferencing system. Many times I wished to kick it out, and installing Skype instead of that.
Now I'm glad I didn't...
Skype services still offline in South Africa. Not going to break my head about that. They'll sort it out in due course.
After one of the latest updates I found my all of my address book numbers in Skype.
It turned out it was a new option added in the mobile version, and turned on by default.
Nadella's Microsoft has done a nasty turn, and it's getting worse than it was before. But I'm sure the "freeeee stuuuuf" will blind people like Google did before.
So basically there is nothing that Microsoft can do that would make you happy. If they charged for everything they would be greedy pigs and if they give stuff away they are greedy pigs. Guess you must be waiting for a non-profit company to come to your rescue.
No, it may just not be convenient if your alter ego is Fisting Bondage Master from Acton and damn Skype wants to add your family, friends, and business contacts.
Fucking Microsoft can change the settings 'cos they think it is what people want, seeming to ignore fact those users have a brain, and can add whomsoever they choose, without someone in the app development team choosing for them, with no "skip" option.
As of now, Skype login takes multiple attempts, and it works once in a blue moon, only long enough to disconnect itself after a few seconds, enough to get the outstanding messages in IM conversations (are you there? and such) updated.
I'd say that being able to log into the service, while technically a "status change" is way more serious than it sounds from Skype's statement.
Good chance for Hangouts I guess, which has worked nicely so far. Perhaps it would be enough to convince management of switching. We're already on company paid Google accounts after all.
The statement that Skype for web is unaffected is bullshit - here is what my attempt to web connect is telling me ... "Oops, something went wrong... We're having technical problems. We're sorry for the inconvenience. Please try again after a few minutes." That was four hours ago and still counting.
The service would have to be out for several days to tell any difference to their 'instant' message.
I just had a video chat to a friend, however that was using standard sip protocol (videophone/jitsi)
Here is a rather useful sip/webrtc service:
https://www.getonsip.com/webrtc/
Provides sip accounts, and a web interface (voice works to normal sip, but video only works to other browsers) and a url that can call your account, without the other end signing up for anything.
If you pay nothing you can't complain. I have a paid account and use Skype to make international calls to people who only have land-lines. The calls are dirt cheap too and the credit doesn't expire if you don't use it by a set time. The uptime has been impressive; this is the first time Skype has failed in all the years I've been using it, so can't complain. I just hope this isn't a sign of things to come or that the outage lasts much longer.
LOL Andy, you surely saw it was a piss-take... making much the same point...
Dirt cheap (free in many cases) comms outage hits, big deal [[ NOT ]]
Quite understand paid users being a bit miffed, just as I was when my landlines went down 3 times for several days each time... landlineS and therefore my two broadband connections. OK, not both at once, so just slight irritation, but service problems are why I have more than 1 line and more than 2 "unlimited data" ISP accounts.
Has anyone tried Linphone as a (SIP standards-based) alternative to Skype?
As somebody who has been on the internet for longer than I care to remember, I find it annoying and perplexing that almost every New Shiny Thing these days seems to be based around closed proprietary protocols, meaning that users get locked in and there isn't the advantage of competing clients (or competing servers) that you can use if the Shiny Thing soils itself..
Linphone seems to be available for most desktop and mobile platforms, and, apart from the fact that I only found out about it recently and it doesn't seem to be very well-known, it looks like it could be pretty good.
http://www.linphone.org/
SIP is probably recognised by anyone reading ElReg, so links and comments like this could prompt some to assume (A) it may be the author, hoping for publicity or (B) it could include malware.
Not claiming this is case A or B but to perhaps explain why I, and I assume many others, rarely visit such sites.
I take your point, that possibly did look a bit potentially spammy, but then perhaps wouldn't any post that attempts to share information about any lesser-known service?
You may be right that many (I think 'all' might still be a bit generous) Reg readers might know about the SIP protocol, but it's everybody else who started to use Skype because they had originally heard about it from a friend that maybe also needs to hear about what other alternatives also exist. It's through the human network effect that any program and protocol becomes well-known and gains market share.
I'm not involved with Linphone in any way (it is open-source software developed by a company in France created by its original developer); I could equally well have highlighted Ekiga, but it is not available on as many platforms, unfortunately.
Without checking the source code and the binaries myself (beyond my skills), I have no means to check whether Linphone may contain any malware, the same as for any software. I have just enough faith in humanity (possibly misplaced, in this day and age) to hope that most FOSS developers are creating software for decent and honest reasons, which, unfortunately, is often more than can be said for many New Shiny Thing proprietary communication programs which seem to have as an aim from the start to snarf your contacts list, carry out data mining, serve ads, etc..
Many people are also very reluctant to trust Skype, come to that, for exactly the same reasons!