Social networking sites like Twitter lit up with reports today that Skype wouldn't work for users, and the official Skype website went down under heavy traffic from concerned users. The problem affected those on Windows, OS X and Linux systems.
Skype's official blog has reported since that the source of the problem has been identified, and that a fix should be released later today. The speed of the response is much better than a December outage, caused by a software bug, which took the service down for two days.
In the meantime, users can decide to get Skype working again by locating and deleting a file on their systems.
In Windows, delete the "shared.xml" file from the "%appdata%Skype" directory.
In OS X, delete the "shared.xml" file from the "~/Library/Application Support/Skype" (where ~ is your Home folder).
On Linux systems, delete the "shared.xml" file from the "/home/YourLinuxUserName/.Skype" directory.
In all cases, restart Skype after deleting the file and that should fix all connection problems if you do not want to hold on for a fix.
Written by: James Delahunty @ 26 May 2011 16:31
