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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Multiple sources are reporting that Microsoft's popular messaging and voice chat application Skype has been hit by a severe service outage [theverge.com].

The source seems to be a bug in the application which affects users from seeing each other [engadget.com]. Microsoft has stated that they have found the cause of the problem and is slowly working to restore service [telegraph.co.uk], 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 [skype.com].

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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?

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