The human impact of the Skype outage... (real pain being felt right now)

As of this moment, Skype is back working for me and tells me that 3,181,959 people are online.  However, given the performance this morning, I am not expecting it to stay up.  It's been fading in and out all day.

The last we heard from Skype was about six hours ago in their "Where we are at 1100 GMT" post. The comments (currently 81) to that post are quite fascinating to read.  Some are the typical kind of outrage you expect.  Some are passing along the latest speculation. Some are giving reports of continued outage.  Some include links to news articles.  Some bash Skype.  Some praise Skype.  As is typical, some bash other commenters (like this one apparently from a Skype-using-solider in Iraq).  Some plead for a return.  Some suggest alternatives

In the midst of that (and the other entries with comments: here(183), here(54) and here (64)), you see the comments dealing with the human side:

I miss my friends!!

Thanks for the information, I miss my parents in Mexico, they have the same problem as well, hope today the system comes back

come on guys i need to make an important phone calls plz fix it as soon as possibles

I've not seen any changes in service. Pretty fed up because this is important to bme doing business with my clients.

Now I know not to take a conversation with my boyfriend, who currently is living in Denmark, for granted. Irritating indeed

Hey everyone in the world using SKYPE...wow didn't realize how much we all rely on SKYPE. We use SKYPE for our business. That is how we connect to the world. We connect to all of our contacts using SKYPE. We miss it terribly. All I see is a grey X...need to see the green CK MARK! We basically used our cell service and emails it worked..but made it hard to teleconference...tomorrow is another day Skype..hope we are connected.

I had to plan a flight today with some one in the U.K. this was not very easy sending text messages back and forth on our mobile phones. This problem needs to be fixed soon

Please, please try to resolve this system glitch soon. My business relies so much on Skype voice calls. We are losing business connections every hour if skype isn't availabe.

Hurry it up! This is bad for business!!

You get the idea.  (Kudos to Skype, by the way, for leaving their blog comments open during this situation.)  In another forum where someone was venting, the person somewhat frantically wrote this:

yes but I put my skypein phone # on my resume!!!!

Ouch.

I, too, am impacted to a degree.  Although I am more of a casual user of Skype, i.e. I don't rely on Skype for communication, the number I put in the sidebar to this blog is my SkypeIn number.  Why?  Just because I didn't want to put my home or cell number and figured that it might be a good way to test SkypeIn.  (And in the 7 months I've had it up there I've probably had maybe 2 calls on it resulting from the blog!)  But still, this does cause me to rethink that.  (In fact, I may very shortly change the sidebar number to my GrandCentral number as a layer of redirection.)

The outage looks like it will continue for a while. (I am disconnected again in the time it took me to write this.)  And in the meantime there are real people out there suffering because they have come to depend upon a particular VoIP provider. 

Yes, I work for a company that on one level could be seen as competing with Skype when it comes to business (but we don't run into Skype, really), but an outage of this length isn't good for us as an industry.  Already there are voices out there saying that this shows inherent weaknesses in P2P VoIP (it doesn't, in my opinion).  Perhaps the good news is that people are looking around at alternatives and they are asking these questions now about availability. 

Julian Bond said it perhaps best in an IRC chat room today:

This debacle is proving to be a bit of a shocker. I guess we all got lulled into thinking that Skype was at least as reliable as the Cell networks.

Yes, we did.  Some much more than others (especially those who dropped their landlines and used it for business).

In another post when this is all over, I'll write a bit more from the security side about "lessons learned", but for the moment I think we need to remember that there are real people right now being impacted by all of this.  For better or worse, Skype has become a communication that is (or has been) relied upon by many.  Hopefully the folks in Estonia and other locations can get this fixed soon.

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage

Comments

[aaytch]

Dan,

Perhaps you can investigate or comment. This explanation makes a certain amount of sense to me (from a posting on GigaOM - not mine):

Number of Skype Authentication servers:

Count == 50; // Clustered

Number of potential Skype clients:

Count = 220,000,000 // Mostly decentralized

Number of SuperNode clients to maintain network connectivity:

Count = N / 300 at any one time.

• If there are 3.0 million users online then the ratio is 3,000,000 / 300 = 10,000 == Supernodes available
• Supernodes are bootstraps into the network for normal first run clients ("and handle routing of children calls").
• Supernodes maintain the network overlay via a DHT("Distributed Has Table") "type" method. // This is normally very slow and done over UDP
• If a client cannot find a Supernode, regardless of authentication via central server then is NOT allowed on the Skype network.
Lack of Supernodes mean lack of network connectivity regardless of successful login via “central server”.

You CAN be a Supernode but not have full network connectivity because you have only a portion of the “Distributed Index Data aka DHT”.

MOST people that become Supernodes will bail out if they cannot keep a clear route (”aka calls bail out, client restarts and aborts Supernode status, thus booting it’s 300 - 500 Children and putting them into a “Connecting mode”.

Children that are trying to “Connect” are unable to do anything unless they have a “Supernode” as a parent. // No calls, No IM….

The overview of this is as follows:

Skype introduced a flaw into the network that dealt with “routing” and “fucked” the “decentralized data store aka DHT” this in turn ran clients on a RANDOM search of Supernodes which at this point were well booted off of the network.

In the End:
It is a huge cycle, no matter how many bugs they “fix” in the “central servers” it will take many days for N nodes to become Supernodes so they can route X data from peer A to peer B. This is NOT minor, a fix to the centralized server code base to relay data to N Supernodes there is lack there of, resulting of a very segregate network. Right now there are approximatly 10,000 sub Skype networks instead of 1 Single “in sync” network. When this “data store(see DHT) is in sync globally then the Skype network will be again STABLE.

I know this is very broad but, unless magically all of said nodes can recreate the “single overlay (DHT)” then nothing will be in sync. You will see delayed messaged, delayed or incorrect profiles and presence.

My take, in the end is give it 48 more hours and it may be semi-stable, but hey this is what you get with using end users as your own redundancy…

Yours…

[johann2062]

When I had problems Thursday night,thought it was because of my pc and I removed skype and re-added it. Stunned to find out it was an apparent problem with the service. Please restore the service as soon as poss, missing family and friends.

[James]

The pain is over --- damaka is here!!!!

http://www.damaka.com

I have fallen in love with damaka. The software seems like Skype... but has WAY MORE FEATURES than Skype... plus I like the user interface... very crisp and easy to use.

I found the call quality to be better and video quality beats everyone (Skype, yahoo and the gang) It has some really great features like desktop sharing and videomail. And hey it has free voicemail (not like Skype)... now who doesn't like free???

Well, check it out yourself...

http://www.damaka.com

James.W.

[James]

The pain is over --- damaka is here!!!!

http://www.damaka.com

I have fallen in love with damaka. The software seems like Skype... but has WAY MORE FEATURES than Skype... plus I like the user interface... very crisp and easy to use.

I found the call quality to be better and video quality beats everyone (Skype, yahoo and the gang) It has some really great features like desktop sharing and videomail. And hey it has free voicemail (not like Skype)... now who doesn't like free???

Well, check it out yourself...

http://www.damaka.com

James.W.

[ada]

It's good to know there are other good alternatives like www.jajah.com and www.zoippe.com