Skype outage raises questions about viability of Voice over IP (VoIP) services
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Published:
Week 34
August 2007 -
Image Source:
Skype
News:
On August 16th 2007 Skype’s peer-to-peer network suffered a major outage which made its services unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.
Skype (which is owned by online auction company eBay) has indicated that the disruption was triggered by the restart of a huge number of its users’ PCs in a short timeframe. This occurred as Skype users’ computers rebooted following a routine set of patches delivered by Microsoft using its “Windows Update” software.
Skype stated that its peer-to-peer network normally has an inbuilt ability to “self-heal” but a “previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm prevented the ‘self-healing’ function from working quickly.”
Skype made it clear that the outage was not the result of any malicious activity and that its users’ security “was not, at any point, at risk.” It acknowledged that the disruption was “unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope”.
