Since early afternoon the VoIP platform owned by Microsoft has stopped working. The causes of the malfunction are unknown
A warning had already been given in the middle of the night, between 3 and 6 in the morning. A time, however, in which very few Italian Internet users are online and everything had passed rather quietly. About 12 hours later, however, the problems returned to manifest themselves again, so much so that hundreds of users around the world (including Italy) have begun to complain that Skype does not work.
Since about 3 p.m. on April 26, 2018, Skype's servers have been unreachable, thus preventing the hundreds of millions of users who use it daily to send text messages and make video calls or videoconferences. At the moment it is not yet known why Skype is down: Microsoft, which since 2011 has owned the VoIP software, has not yet made known the reasons or causes behind the stop in operation. Meanwhile, the reports on Downdetector continue to grow rapidly, so that the hashtag #skypedown has quickly become a Trending Topic on Twitter.
Skype down, what's going on
Since no one yet exposes the real causes of Skype malfunction, it is difficult to exclude any of the hypotheses on the table. Online someone murmurs of a possible hacker attack that would have involved the Skype servers, but the hypothesis seems to lose strength since some Skype services seem to continue to work. Several users, in fact, report that they can continue to make VoIP calls, while chat text messages would be rejected or delivered with great delay. In short, more than a hacker attack, it is likely that there is some malfunction of a part of the infrastructure or an error involving the protocol for sending messages.
As the minutes pass, however, the situation is normalizing, a sign that Microsoft technicians have identified the problem and are trying to solve it.