Skype is the latest in a series of high-profile web outages (updated)

The last 24 hours have served as a reminder of just how precarious the strands that connect us to the internet can be. Skype is reporting that some its services have fallen over after a bug was found that's preventing users from being seen as visible, rendering them incapable of making any voice or video calls. The news comes just a few short hours after The Next Web reported that an Amazon Web Services location in Virginia broke down, forcing some of the world's most popular services, including Netflix, AirBnB and Viber, offline. The Amazon outage has been mostly fixed by now, and Skype is pledging to get its own issues shorted post-haste, but if any rival video call providers wanted to take advantage of the situation, now would be the time.

Update: Looks like our long national nightmare has ended, and Skype is now starting to come back online for most users.