I Hope Microsoft Got The Extended Warranty

Skype is down, Skype is down! Well, for some people anyway. While the service outage isn’t widespread enough to be a pandemic (working fine over here), enough users are reporting/complaining about it via Twitter to indicate a widespread whoops.

Skype has responded with a tweet of its own, saying 30 minutes ago that they’re investigating and hope to have details soon. Meanwhile, somewhere in Redmond, a frothing Steve Ballmer wishes he had kicked the tyres just a few more times on his sweet new ride.

Update: Skype says they’ll be rolling out a fix shortly, but The Next Web has the goods right now:

Windows Vista and Windows 7

1. Close Skype.
a. Right-click the Skype icon in the system tray (at the bottom right of the screen)
b. Choose Quit.
2. Ensure that “Show hidden files and folders” is switched on.
a. Click Start, type run and press Enter.
b. Type control folders and click OK.
c. Select the View tab and ensure relevant entry is enabled.
3. Locate the shared.xml file.
a. Click Start, type run and press Enter.
b. Type %appdata%\skype and click OK.
c. Delete the shared.xml file.
4. Restart Skype. The shared.xml file will be recreated.

Windows XP

1. Close Skype.
a. Right-click the Skype icon in the system tray (at the bottom right of the screen)
b. Choose Quit.
2. Ensure that “Show hidden files and folders” is switched on.
a. Click Start and then Run…
b. Type control folders and click OK.
c. Select the View tab and ensure relevant entry is enabled.
3. Locate the shared.xml file.
a. Click Start and then Run…
b. Type %appdata%\skype and click OK.
c. Delete the shared.xml file.
4. Restart Skype. The shared.xml file will be recreated.

Mac OS X

1. Quit Skype.
2. Go to the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Skype/
3. Delete the file shared.xml (it will be recreated once you open Skype again, this is fine).
4. Start Skype.

[Engadget, TNW]


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