Yesterday, people using Skype, the world leader solution in VoIP phone calls, started having big connection problems that left many millions with the impossibility to use Skype for their calls.
Skype hadn’t worked for about two days in 2007, when millions users were cut out of their connections by the reboot of a huge amount of PCs worldwide after a Windows update. Today the situation looks less catastrophic as it seems that the situation is slowly getting back to normal but once more Skype’s VoIP connections vulnerability has been revealed.
Skype’s network is based on supernodes, servers that are contacted by Skype’s software to find the call destination routing the connections the appropriate way. Yesterday the supernodes network started going offline and from what Skype engineers discovered some problems in some software versions triggered a progressive collapse of the supernodes.
The activation of new mega-supernodes, which presumably should be servers with bigger resources, allowed the start of the gradual reactivation of the services.
[ad name=”Google Adsense 300″]
Skype pointed out that some enterprise products kept on working which is something considering that the company is preparing for a public offering and wants to sell its services to business customers.
Certainly this accident isn’t a good advertisment for Skype. I could have taken the article I wrote almost exactly three months ago when there was a Facebook black out, change the name, modify the section concerning the cause of the problem and publish it but we’re not talking about a social network used mostly for fun. Skype is trying to sell its services to business customers and obviosly they need reliable solutions.
With Facebook down people can’t publish the pics they just took, with Skype down companies and professionals who decided to adopt it instead of a normal phone might lose money. Obviously there are failures in normal phone lines too and their victims can have big problems because of them but Skype’s issue was global and that gave the impression that its technology isn’t mature enough to trust that kind of solution.
