Skype explains outage, offers vouchers to customers

A systemwide failure which took down the popular VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service for about 24 hours beginning at 4pm GMT December 22 was caused by a server overload, chief information officer Lars Rabbe disclosed on Wednesday. This overload in turn caused delayed communication with Skype customers, partly causing crashes.

In Skype's network, the supernode plays a critical part in the handling of VoIP traffic, acting as a directory and helping to route calls. Anyway you look at it without this the system had a difficult time handling traffic. The load was at the time passed on to the remaining supernodes, which at once began to shut down as a result of a massively increased load.

Essentially, a domino effect of failures in the long run made much of the network unavailable for near a day as Skype worked to stabilize the system. However, with the system to all appearances stable, the service is working to prevent it from happening again.

The company

Rabbe said the company was looking for bugs in its software like the one in the Windows client, and providing hotfixes as necessary. Just in case, the company would review its early warning capabilities to help detect serious problems much before and along these lines prevent a similar major failure.

"Lessons will be learned and we will use this as an possibility to identify and introduce areas of improvement to our software, furthermore assess and invest in capacity and stability, and develop better processes for outage recovery and communications to our user base," Rabbe concluded.

Time in the straightway 5 years

If Skype goes down for more than 4 hours at a time in the straightway 5 years, they are never to be trusted again. I do believe/hope that they've learned their lesson and the network will come out much more robust/reliable so this hopefully won't happen again.

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A systemwide failure which took down the popular VoIP service for about 24 hours beginning at 4pm GMT December 22 was caused by a server overload, the company says.

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