Well, the official word is out from Skype and it can be summarized: the reboots from Microsoft patches triggered a previously-undetected condition and crashed out network. 

Skype PR staffer Villu Arak writes in “What happened on August 16“:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Okay… I can buy that this type of thing could trigger some kind of chain reaction, but I don’t understand why this month was different than any other month.  For.. what? two or three years now (more?) Microsoft patches have been coming out like clockwork on the second Tuesday of each month.  Each second Tuesday or Wednesday, the millions of computers set to auto-update do so.  All those zillions of computers restart automatically.  Each and every month.  What was so…

According to Skype’s “Update at midnight GMT“, the Skype outage should be resolving over the next few hours:

We are pleased to announce that the situation continues to improve. The sign-on problems have been resolved. Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational. We know what our faithful users have been going through and we thank you for your patience and kind support.

Skype has come back online for me and the Skype client tells me there are now over 4 million users online, which is the first time I’ve seen it show that since Wednesday.  Given that it’s been going up and down all day, I’ll withhold judgement for a while, but that number does seem to be climbing (if we can believe the number, which is an open question).  My contact list is slowly repopulating with its normal list of people.  We’ll see.

So the question really is – will Skype see any long-term impact because of this outage?

Certainly in the short-term Skype will have an awful lot of explaining to do.  There are certainly some number of business users who have come to rely on SkypeIn and SkypeOut.  I know…

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…

Somewhat predictably, the blogosphere is going nuts about the Skype outage.   It’s currently at the top of Techmeme.  As Tris Hussey notes in his post, Skype has indeed become a key communication tool for many individuals and businesses.  Other VoIP bloggers offering commentary:

• Om Malik: “Does Skype Outage Expose P2P’s Limitations?“
• Tom Keating: “Skype Outage” – wonders if it had to do with the Microsoft updates (I would think not because the outage happened to me prior to me installing the updates)
• Andy Abramson: “Skype Suffers Major Outage” – helpfully points people to Gizmo and SightSpeed as alternatives

The Register, of course, chimed in with their normal attitude.  Ars Technica, meanwhile, commented that the outage was surprising mostly because of “”how often it doesn’t happen”.  Taking another view, Mashable is reporting that eBay’s stock has dipped this morning.

Meanwhile, Skype users around the world consider what other IM programs to use and some of them will, maybe, just maybe, have to actually pick up a phone today!

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage

As a Skype user, I was a bit surprised when, after restarting my computer today (due to a crash when I was trying SecondLife with voice, but that’s another story), the Skype icon just kept on spinning and spinning saying “Connecting”.  And then it would be online… and then it wasn’t… and then it was… and then it wasn’t….

My first sign that it was something larger than my (sometimes flaky) laptop was a Facebook status update by Jim Courtney saying that Skype might have an outage for 12-24 hours.  About the same time I saw a tweet from Chris Brogan.  The “social networking information sharing network” was hard at work…

A trip to Skype’s “Heartbeat” page showed the problem:

Oops.

Nicely, though, Skype staff have posted a status update on their heartbeat page:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

So sometime…