Skype was down for millions of users today. Twitter was buzzing with users saying they couldn’t login. Initially, Skype engineers weren’t sure what the problem was and directed users to monitor @Skype on Twitter for updates. According to Om Malik, this response was simply not good enough:
Sorry, not good enough! Skype is one of the key applications of the modern web. It is already a hit with consumers, and over past few years it has become part of the economic fabric for startups and small businesses around the world. I am not sure we can comprehend the productivity cost of this outage.
Skype is an important communications tool for a lot of people. For many, it gets more use than their actual phones. While many users aren’t paying, they were still adversely affected by the outage and many were just as upset as Om.
According to Skype, the outage was due to some of their “supernodes” being unavailable because “many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype.” Skype works as a distributed network, this is why some users had no problems and others were unable to login. Key pieces of the network failed, effectively blocking users across the globe.
As Om points out, a peer-to-peer network like Skype shouldn’t really go down. This outage shows that there are some chinks in the Skype armor and the network may not be as robust as originally thought. This also comes at a time when Skype is pushing into the business sector and just coming from an IPO.
Skype says that their engineers are frantically creating new “mega-supernodes” which should resolve the problem, but many users are still experiencing difficulties at this time.