2007-08-17

It happened in the past!

There were some moments ago like 115 comments on the last update of Villu Arak, the main Blogger of Skype. Quite some Skype Blog readers are complaining about the hollow explanation concerning the cause of the Skype Outage.

Skype User acceinlondon made the following comment on the Skype Blogs:
"Could you perhaps give us more information about what caused the fault. This is the way to keep customers happy. Don't you appreciate when an airline company takes the time to explain why the flight is delayed. Give us a little more info...". I completely agree with him.

In the meantime, a lot of these commenters and bloggers are spreading several rumours:
  • The Windows XP and Vista updates (and what about Linux and Macintosh?)
  • Russian Hackers
  • A bug in the new Skype 3.5 release
The only small real explanation (from Villu Arak) was this: “The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. … This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software.

This seems to be confirmed by an interview given to the New York Times by Kurt Sauer, Skype’s chief security officer: “What happened today was caused by a unique set of events, the genesis of which is not entirely understood.” And “A flaw in a crucial piece of software that connects users to these servers appears to have been the source of the problem. Skype engineers said the flaw existed in every copy of the Skype software that had been downloaded since the service’s start in 2003. Skype executives said they still did not know why the error, sitting dormant for four years, suddenly crashed the network.

OK, could be! Last year, the day Skype reached 7.000.000 people online, a similar but quite shorter outage happened, see here “frozen Skype cloud”. I don't remember having seen any official Skype explanation about the phenomenon!

And i have severall times seen much smaller events like this, almost always around the daily peak time (see the small inserted graphs)! Therefore: yes, it is probably a flaw in the software!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

While Skype was OUT, one of my business associates suggested another similar app - DAMAKA. (http://www.damaka.com). I downloaded it and we ave been using it since. We both like it a lot. Simple and easy to use, packed with a lot of features. I love the conferencing - the fact that I can do video conferencing (for free) is really cool. We were actually paying for VIDEO Conferencing from another company, but after we found damaka, we will save more than $45 per month. (Just on video alone). Really cool!!!

Make sure you go to their features page to see how they can save you money:

The website address is:
http://www.damaka.com

Andy