Yesterday morning (about 0900 EDT in the US) the internet phone and messaging company Skype acknowledged that its users were experiencing log-on problems due to a software problem. The problem shut down the service to an unknown number of customers around the world, but it was likely in the millions.
According to the Financial Times of London late this afternoon, the problem has been fixed. Now let the debate begin as to whether this will harm Skype in particular or internet calling in general.
It will be interesting to see how similar this "software problem" will be to the one that happened on 15 January 1990 when AT&T suffered a massive failure of its long-distance service due to a elementary programming error.
