So late last week Skype basically messed the bed and left millions of users stranded without access to the popular software. I noticed this as well when I tried to login. At times it would allow me to login but, it showed my status as being “offline” as well as that off all my contacts.
So, what did happen?
In an interview with the New York Times, one Skype executive said that the problem was caused by a flaw in Skype’s four-year-old software and that it was unclear why the problem had remained dormant until this week.
“The longer this goes on, and the more promises that Skype breaks, the more trust in Skype will fall and the worse the long-term damage,” wrote Jupiter Research analyst Ian Fogg in a report on the New York firm’s Web site.
“It cost me some serious phone charges this morning as I had a two-hour conference call with a client for which I had to use my higher-priced land line,” complained one user in a posting on The Washington Post’s Web site.
But Michael Hamm, a Skype user in California who has used the service for about a year, said the glitch wouldn’t change his loyalties.
“Not at all. It’s free, man!” he said.
Indeed. So, my curiousity remains…what did happen?
UPDATE: Ah, now here we go. This from Villu Arak today.
On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. 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.
The full Skype response.
Tags: Skype, Skype Outage
