August 20, 2007 11:21 AM PDT
Skype's 'unprecedented' outage
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Is the Skype outage really a big deal?
August 17, 2007
According to a statement released by Skype on Monday, the outage--which affected a significant portion of Skype's users--came about Thursday with "a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short time frame."
The restart stemmed from a routine Windows update. "This caused a flood of log-in requests which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact," Skype's statement said.
The VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) company, which is owned by eBay, admitted that the majority of its users had been unable to access the service between Thursday and Saturday.
A company representative confirmed to ZDNet UK, a CNET News.com sister site, on Monday morning that a fix was now in place for a bug in Skype's network resource allocation algorithm. The bug, revealed for the first time on Thursday, had stopped Skype's built-in "self-healing function" from working properly, causing the most severe outage in the history of the popular VoIP client.
Skype was keen to say that the outage was not the work of hackers or any other malicious activity, and it claimed that its users' security "was not, at any point, at risk."
"This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope," the statement said. "We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions. We are very proud that over the four years of its operation, Skype has provided a technically resilient communications tool to millions of people worldwide."
Mark Main, a broadband analyst at Ovum, blogged Friday that it was "quite an achievement" for Skype to have gone so long without an outage of this severity. However, he also suggested that Skype's quality of service had been deteriorating recently, and he said that resilience remained a common issue for commercial VoIP services.
"Perhaps we should still consider some VoIP services as being like a shortcut over rocky ground instead of the smoother, but longer and well-trodden path," wrote Main. "Many users may not yet have decided how many jarred ankles they will tolerate over that rocky ground. You still broadly get what you pay for in telecoms and there is a compromise users must accept in these relatively early days of VoIP-based voice services, especially with the free on-net services."
Thirty percent of Skype's 220 million customers are business users, according to the company's own figures, with the vast majority of those choosing Internet telephony to save costs.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
See more CNET content tagged:
Skype,
outage,
VoIP,
P2P,
VoIP service
Isn't their a law for a public company to not lie about something that could affect shares???
This sounds like a "we're not sure why the problem happened, but it happened at the same time as THIS happened, so it must be THIS" case. It's easy to blame Microsoft and that sounds exactly like what Skype is doing.
Please rethink your reply and get us the REAL story. Stop blaming Microsoft...
Can they honestly say they couldn't predict that would happen? Was this the first time Microsoft has ever released an update that required a reboot? I mean come on, they've been doing that for over a decade now. Surely Skype would have noticed that and figured that into their planning.
I just don't buy it.
Any administrator who manages a a network of more than 100
machines now what havoc can be created (and I do write: CAN
be) by Microsoft automatic update. In fact, even when you plan a
schedule update (like at night) for all your PCs and another night
for the server, even when you know what the update is about
and what it should be doing, you NEVER REALLY know what the
end result will be like...
How many times did I had to come in early to restart some
Exchange services, manually disconnect and reconnect USB2
devices, etc. following a Windows update...
How many times have I witnessed unusual IP activity from the
workstations following a Windows update...
I'm not having a go at Microsoft, or pitting them against another
platform. It's just reality
Their installer implants Skype to start up automatically. If you remove the startup, it reinstalls it automatically unless the user disables auto-startup with each and every login.
It's the same with Yahoo Messenger.
All these conceited IM software developers think everyone want's their IM to run all the time.
They can't blame anyone except themselves.
2. "Skype was keen to say that the outage was not the work of hackers or any other malicious activity, "
You can have one or the other, but not both. ;
If you (mis)use it for serious/business things, it's your own fault. Use a professional VOIP service.