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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???
Thus they are self-administrative with their networks which, 9 times out of 10, means they are running the default settings on every program on their computer.
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.
From Computerworld:
'Although Skype fingered Tuesday's Windows updates for triggering the outage, it said the root cause was "a previously unseen software bug within the network resource-allocation algorithm" that prevented the network from recovering on its own, as it was supposed to do.'
On the other hand, we get boloney explanations from companies all the time about system failures. Just last week it was the passenger clearing system at LAX. The two outages were "supposed" to have been caused by a bad network card. Maybe, maybe not.
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.
Many installers ask you upon installation (sometimes in "advanced" configuration) if you want it to start with the system. I tell it no. If not, you can go into the settings and turn it off.
Just to make sure, you can type "msconfig" at the run prompt, and make sure it's unchecked in the startup tab.
While the big-name messengers may be bloated & crappy (why I use trillian/pidgin mostly), they aren't so devious as to blatantly disregard a settings change. That's your own fault.
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.