The blogosphere is buzzing about Skype being offline, as documented on the Skype Heartbeat. Essentially, the authentication system is not working correctly. If you were previously logged into Skype, you can still use it. However, if you're trying to get on, it's not going to let you.

I decided to check out the competition. Gizmo Project, which provides a lot of the same functionality sans video was giving me grief on my Mac, but was working fine on my Nokia N800. I didn't see too many more people on there than usual.

Meanwhile, I fired up SightSpeed and gave their CEO Peter Csathy a call to ask him how much traffic he's seeing on SightSpeed. The answer: almost double their normal.

Look for links to other coverage after the jump.

Coverage:

• Skype Outage from Tom Keating
• Skype Suffers Major Outage from Andy Abramson
• Skype Outage from Asterisk VoIP News
• Skype Outage from Irwin Lazar
• Does Skype Outage Expose P2P Limitations from GigaOm