Skype was off line for about 48 hours last week. The reason, per the Skype folk, is most interesting:
[ plenty of further details and comments at the url ]" What happened on August 16 By Villu Arak on August 20, 2007. (Posted at 5:35 AM GMT, updated first two paragraphs at 11:45 AM GMT)
" On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
" The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.
rest (and make sure to go through the comments) :