User:Aph08/sandbox

Usage and traffic
Users may have more than one account; it is not possible to count users, only accounts.

The volume of international traffic routed via Skype is significant. It has become the largest international voice carrier (by minutes of calls).
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In January 2011, after the release of video calling on the Skype client for iPhone, Skype reached a record 27 million simultaneous online users. This record was broken with 29 million simultaneous online users on 21 February 2011, and again on 28 March 2011 with 30 million online users. On 25 February 2012, Skype announced that it has over 32 million users for the first time ever. As of 5 March 2012, it has broken to 36 million simultaneous online users and less than a year later, on 21 January 2013, Skype had more than 50 million concurrent users online. On September 9, 2013, reports suggest over 62 million concurrent users online. In June 2012, Skype had surpassed 70 million downloads on an Android Device.

On 19 July 2012, Microsoft announced that Skype users had logged 115 billion minutes of calls over the quarter, up 50% since the last quarter.

According to Skype’s internal data from January 2013, there are 300 million Skype users worldwide, out of which 47 million users are in the US. In addition, there has been a 36% growth in Skype’s international traffic in 2013 – this is equivalent to 214 billion minutes throughout the year. On April 3, 2013, Skype celebrated its users spending 2 billion minutes a day using their service.

Service in the People's Republic of China
Since September 2007, users in China trying to download the Skype software client have been redirected to the site of TOM Online, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and Skype, from which a modified Chinese version can be downloaded. The TOM client participates in China's system of Internet censorship, monitoring text messages between Skype users in China as well as messages exchanged with users outside the country. Niklas Zennström, then chief executive of Skype, told reporters that TOM "had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing. Those are the regulations." He also stated: "One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users."

In October 2008, it was reported that TOM had been saving the full message contents of some Skype text conversations on its servers, apparently focusing on conversations containing political issues such as Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, and the Chinese Communist Party. The saved messages contain personally identifiable information about the message senders and recipients, including IP addresses, usernames, land line phone numbers, and the entire content of the text messages, including the time and date of each message. Information about Skype users outside China who were communicating with a TOM-Skype user was also saved. A server misconfiguration made these log files accessible to the public for a time.

Research on the TOM-Skype venture has revealed information about blacklisted keyword checks, allowing censorship and surveillance of its users. The partnership has received much criticism for the latter. Microsoft remains unavailable for comment on the issue.

According to reports from the advocacy group – Great Fire - Microsoft have modified censorship restrictions and ensured encryption of all user information. Furthermore, Microsoft is now partnered with Guangming Founder (GMF) in China.

Outages and downtime
On 16 August 2007, Skype became unavailable for two days to a majority of its users. Millions of users were requesting to log in at the same time following a routine Windows Update and this flooded the peer-to-peer system.

On 22 December 2010, it was reported that Skype experienced an outage estimated to represent 8 million foregone calls. Skype administrators placed the following message on their Twitter page: "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations...engineers and site operations are working non-stop to get things back to normal." The problem came down to the limited availability of "supernodes", affecting some versions of Skype. Later in the day, Skype's CEO, Tony Bates, issued an apology. He said that the matter was being taken very seriously and was being thoroughly investigated. He said that malicious attack was not being ruled out as a problem cause and he put his estimate of the foregone calls at about 10 million. On 23 December 2010, Skype's blog with Tony Bates issued another apology through a video posted on YouTube for the Skype outage.

The problem persisted across the North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. It had started to subside by 8:30 pm UTC; however users were warned it might take several hours for the program to be fully operative again. It was reported at 9:27 am 23 December UTC that most users were able to log in again although some still could not. On the other hand into Thursday only about a third of the expected traffic was actually using Skype, relative to the time-period. On 23 December 2010, Skype said on its blog that the system had stabilized, and a detailed explanation of the incident was published six days later. Bates offered all Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay customers a free call to any landline as compensation. Subscribers had their subscription extended by one week.

On May 26, 2011, Skype reported on twitter about a “small number” of users experiencing disruption in service: “Some of you may have problems signing into Skype and making calls. We’re investigating and hope to have more details to share soon.” About an hour after this update, the users were updated about the problem being identified and a series of steps to resolve the issue was posted on Skype’s blog. Windows, Mac and Linux users faced this glitch.

A number of users had trouble logging onto Skype through their Microsoft accounts on April 25, 2013. Skype officially notified the users about this, and the problem was resolved soon after for most users.