How Much Will Outage Hurt Skype?

A day afterwards going down, Skype’s Internet telephone service was returning slowly to normal Thursday, the company said. More than 16 million users are online — about 80% of what one would broadly speaking expect, CEO Tony Bates said. “We’re 100% focused on getting Skype back in action,” the company said on Twitter. Skype as well said it would offer vouchers to paying clients who weren’t able to access the service.

The course in the Internet world

Brief service disruptions are par for the course in the Internet world, now a 24-hour comprehensive collapse is incredible. Skype’s ability to convince people that it’s as dependable as a major telecom has been damaged, in spite of assurances that its paid product for businesses, Skype Connect, remained working as a general rule.

Internet companies like Skype have an uphill battle when it comes to soothing people’s fears over reliability. It’s one of the biggest barriers to “cloud computing” — a broad term for services delivered over the Internet. People just aren’t sure about entrusting all their data and documents to a company that could become inaccessible.

Skype has diagnosed the problem — nevertheless that isn’t necessarily reassuring. It appears that the glitch involves a fundamental aspect of Skype’s infrastructure. The company explained yesterday that the outage was related to “supernodes” — computers on Skype’s system that serve as digital telephone directories. A software problem took many of these “supernodes” down, meaning people couldn’t connect.

Skype uses what’s called “peer-to-peer” research. This means that your calls through Skype aren’t all going through some central location now are making use of the computers of other users — your “peers” in this network. Nearly any computer could be a “supernode,” and this diffuse structure means Skype is relying on potentially unstable computers that belong to users. It couldn’t just flip a switch and fix the problem in such a case.