Heh, no not India, and no it isn't an external issue or it would exist as a problem beyond the boundary of my phone. Skype works everywhere else, even via the phone using mobilehotspot from a PC.

Removing the plugin and associated config is probably worth a shot though.

So I remove-purged skype-plugin, rebooted, installed skype plugin, rebooted. Same problem, won't sign in.

I ran a tcpdump on the next hop, and while it says "Signing in" it doesn't actually issue any packets.

So this is looking more like a library dependency has been updated to something that skype cannot use.