Skype Archive

Update 14:00 Monday: Here are some good reads regarding how Skype handled the outage:

• Andy Beal thinks they dropped the ball with crisis communications
• Om Malik wonders why he didn't receive one email with an update – great point Om!
• Peter Ha agrees with me – it's your fault!
• Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft seems to say "what else aren't they telling us, it can't be Microsoft's fault"

Skype has provided the full explanation as to what happened last week when the service experienced an outage lasting over 36 hours. They open the explanation with:

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.

So if I read correctly, it was our fault for updating Windows. Blah. What would have been great is to start with, "We are sorry, we screwed up." Instead, they push the blame around. Double blah.

They continue with:

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.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

So there was also an issue with Skype's software but this wouldn't have happened if MS provided bug-free software. I love Skype but am disappointed with this final update message.

"Does Skype matter?" is the question on the plate this morning. Jason Calacanis, A-list Webulebrity and better-search engine builder, believes no. In a comment left yesterday here on CenterNetworks he said, "Is the Skyp outage that big news? If it happens again, or becomes a trend maybe. But every service goes down at some point… not sure this is as major a news story for folks outside the 'techcrunch 100k.'"

I am not sure what a "techcrunch 100k" is, but if we assume that it's the readership of Techcrunch, I have to disagree. If you review the comments on our Skype Down post 24 hours ago (the first U.S. site to report on the outage), the majority of the 68 comments come from non-webtechies. It is interesting to note that while Jason doesn't believe it's big news, he was quick to create a "stub" page on Mahalo.

Now let's shift gears to a post on Techcrunch, authored by Duncan Riley. Duncan notes that eBay stock dropped $1 billion in market cap yesterday. The post seemed quite ambiguous as to whether Skype was the reason Duncan believes that the stock lost its value. I asked, "Just so I understand Duncan, are you suggesting that the $1 b market cap reduction was due to Skype down today?" Duncan promptly replied with, "the failure of eBay to bounce towards the end of the day when the NASDAQ did (the red line in the chart) would seem to indicate that yes: there is a link." Luckily Mike (Techcrunch Editor) responded shortly thereafter, "There’s no link at all between these as far as I can tell." While a continued Skype outage will affect the books, right now it's a public relations issue.

My answer to the initial question is: Yes, Skype matters. Companies bank on Skype to provide services which they pay for. I have a Skype-In and a Voicemail which I pay for so this outage hurts. Jason and Duncan sit on opposite sides which is a shock considering how much they are tied into the Internet. As the outage continues, other p2p/voip services must be loving it. And it's a wakeup call for those that rely 100% on the service. Have a backup plan just in case it's needed.

FYI, as of 7:30 Eastern, Skype is still down. New note on their blog as of 11:00 GMT.

Anyone else with Skype down? For me, it's been down since at least 5am eastern. I have another report out of Switzerland that it's also down there. The Web site is not loading as well.

Please report in, thanks.

Update Friday 16:20 Eastern – Appears to be working now for last 20 minutes.

Update Friday 06:20 Eastern – Still down, new note on Skype blog.

Update 20:20 Eastern – Still down.

Update 17:00 Eastern – Still down.

Update: 12:22 Eastern – Thanks everyone for reporting in! Here is the official update. Looks like another half-day possibly before it is back.

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.