New record: 20 million people on Skype at the same time
Milestones are significant for us, not just because they’re big numbers, but because they reflect the actions of people around the world using Skype to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues. Right now, there are 20 million people around the world, saying hello (or bonjour, or hola, or 喂, or tere) to their parents across continents, having dinner with their spouses from hotel rooms across countries, and keeping an eye on their pets from across town.
But big numbers are hard to get our heads around – what does 20 million actually mean? We can think about it in terms of the number of families kept closer together, or the number of businesses saving money and staying ahead of the competition. Right now. The number of new babies being shown off to adoring grandparents, or the number of romances being kept alive. Right now.
In fact, in the 30 seconds since you started reading this, those 20 million people have made around 1,600 hours of free Skype-to-Skype calls and 200 hours of calls to landlines and mobiles. That’s a lot of people talking. Right now.
marcelrondel commented Monday, Nov 9
Congratulations! But what does 20 million people online actually mean? Does it mean 20 million people with the status "online" or that 20 million Skype users are not offline? Or does it mean, as your blog suggests, that 20 million people are talking at the same time? If the latter is the case, there must be at least 200 million Skype users who are not offline at the same time!
I am looking for the answer to this question for a long time already.
joshuabowen24 commented Monday, Nov 9
I wanted to say that I believe that that number represents the total number of skype users who are logged into the skype servers at any given time
Peter Parkes commented Monday, Nov 9
‘20 million’ means 20 million people signed in to Skype at the same time. They may not all be calling or IMing at the same time, but they’re able to do so. I hope that clarifies things 
devi.joshi commented Wednesday, Nov 11
Does that mean Skype needs to upgrade its infrastructure to withstand this large traffic, to prevent lots of drop calls? Can you kindly let me know what's Skype been doing in regard to this issue?
Peter Parkes commented Thursday, Nov 12
@devi.joshi because Skype’s a peer-to-peer app, you actually benefit from having lots of people online at once
If you’re having problems with dropped calls, you should check out our call quality guide – let me know if that helps.
devi.joshi commented Thursday, Nov 12
Helped a little bit, but not to my expectations.
Anyways Congratulations on achieving this milestone.
misnu43 commented Thursday, Nov 19
Congratulations on the 20 Million! However, I have noticed a significant degradation in call quality above 15 million users, when calling from Iraq on my computer to US telephones, both landlines but particularly cellphones. Calls are almost impossible as the numbers grow into the 17million and 18 millions. The mechanical sounds in the voices on both ends, and the inability to hear at all most times. Is there a fix to this? Or does capacity need to be increased by the company?
freddyn001 commented Tuesday, Mar 23
I have seen 22,380,123 millions people online on skype on february 2010
nicole.mcginley commented Thursday, May 20
does skype have a statistic that breaks down the use for skype? Like what percent is business vs personal??
Peter Parkes commented Monday, May 24
@nicole.mcginley around 35% of people use Skype for business purposes.