Skype Outage Causes Headaches

By Greg McNevin

August 20, 2007: Skype’s VoIP service is taking a public beating following a 24 plus hour service outage late last week that left many of its customers scowling and no doubt brought expansive smiles to the faces of traditional telecommunications operators.

While some are speculating that the outage is due to a malicious DNS attack, the company claims that the issue stems from a problem in its software, specifically the algorithm that underpins client-network communication.

“We’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing,” the company wrote on its official blog. “Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of [malicious] attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.”

Problems began last Thursday for the popular VoIP service, and in many cases continued throughout the weekend with users in countries such as the US, Germany and here in Australia experiencing difficulty logging in. Even if they could get online chat messages reportedly could not be sent nor calls made.

“Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal,” the company wrote in an update to its official blog on Saturday, adding a promise to further elaborate on the issue today. “We’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.”

With around 220 million users around the globe, the four-year old Skype (now owned by eBay) is the most popular VoIP service in use today. This has left many commentators speculating that the issues experienced over the weekend could be a sign that it is collapsing under the weight of its own success.

Short term problem or not though, the issue highlights that while it has much momentum, Skype’s service and VoIP services as a whole are still vulnerable to outages and should be supported by traditional telecommunications for robust business continuity.

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