Update, 6/20/17, 11 AM ET: Microsoft has updated its post to say that it’s seeing improvements, but some users may still be experiencing issues.
Microsoft tells TechCrunch it’s looking into what it can share with us about the incident, and we’ll update accordingly. Following that update, the company’s support account then continued to say that the issue is ongoing to incoming complaints from users on Tuesday. It also appears that Microsoft had believed the issue to be fixed earlier on June 19th, according to one tweet, which claimed the issue was resolved. But again, details are still sparse on that for now. Plus, given Skype’s own tweet referencing the global nature of the incident, it appears that users outside the highlighted regions may also have been affected. However, users on the DownDetector site posting from the affected regions on Tuesday morning were still reporting a mix of “it’s back” and “still down” comments. But Microsoft has not 100 percent confirmed this, which is why it has not yet been announced. We also understand from people close to the situation at Microsoft that Europe is the primary region affected.
and elsewhere in Europe, according to outage maps on DownDetector’s website. The incident, details of which have been circulating on Twitter under the #skypedown hashtag, appears to have largely affected users in the U.K. There is an ongoing incident affecting the ability to connect to the application: We are investigating, stay tuned! Currently there’s no evidence of that at work here,” he adds.
“Since Mirai, people have understandably been concerned once more about DDoS attacks that could be carried out by IoT devices. In addition, Ryan Olson, threat intelligence director of the Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 threat research team, notes there’s no firm evidence at present that this is the result of any particular attack. The team also promised to take down video game site Steam next.īut as Microsoft has not yet pointed the finger at any group, nor has it even referred to the incident as an “attack,” this sort of claim needs to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt for the time being. They are citing a tweet from a group of cybercriminals who go by the name “CyberTeam,” whose Twitter claims to have caused the crash. We’re trying to get more information now from Microsoft, and will update as it arrives.įilling the informational void, some sites, including Panda Security and CNET, are reporting a DDoS attack may be the cause. Microsoft has not yet detailed the causes, nor any information about how those problems are being addressed. These problems could be related to some sort of system glitch or bug, but they could also be caused by an attack on Skype’s network. So broadly I'm in favour of cross platform technologies such as video chat 'bloating' the HTML5 spec rather than relying on proprietary browser plugins.For some customers yes, we are having a global incident with connectivity, check for updates ^AS And at the end of the day I'd rather trust Mozilla or Google to release timelier fixes for their web-browsers than rely on Microsoft's skype plugin to be updated. There will be security holes in any implementation but there's one attack surface for the entire web platform rather than one for each browser plugin.
or that the inbuilt pdf viewer in Firefox (dog slow that it may be) was running with the same javascript security execution model rather than relying on an external engine (and yes Mozilla do have a flash implementation that works in a similar way to PDF.js)
I'd sleep more soundly at night knowing that the executable code used to make video calls through webRTC was running through exactly the same sandbox as other executable code such as asm.js. Why does anyone believe that the Skype codebase won't be subject to the same sort of attacks and vulnerabilities once it becomes part of the browser?īecause with plugins you're relying on a separate sandbox model from the rest of the browser.