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Skype Outage Hassles Millions of Users
Multiple sources are reporting that Microsoft's popular messaging and voice chat application Skype has been hit by a severe service outage.
The problem seems to be a bug in the application which affects users from seeing each other. Microsoft has stated that they have found the cause of the problem and is slowly working to restore service, however at the time of this writing it seems that a number of global users are still affected.
Link to official Skype status: Skype Heartbeat.
I've been planning to move away from Skype for a while, but its popularity is making it somewhat difficult (akin to the Facebook dilemma: everyone uses it, why switch?) and this outage has underscored the need for redundancy, especially for some things that users view as essential for connectivity. What other similar applications can Soylent recommend?
AWS knocks Amazon, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb offline in MEGA data collapse
Amazon's Web Services (AWS) have been hit by a monster outage affecting the company's cloudy systems, bringing many sites down with it in the process.
The service disruption has hit AWS customers including Netflix, Tinder and IMDb, as well as Amazon's Instant Video and Books websites.
The outage may also explain Airbnb's current service woes. Airbnb is an AWS customer.
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Tuesday September 22 2015, @02:57PM
Personally, I like Telegram [telegram.org] for text-based communication. It's partially open source, you can use it on Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and it's pretty seamless. Start a conversation on your smartphone, pick it up on your computer at home. Couldn't tell you about video-based communication as I try to avoid that whenever possible.