23 December 2010
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Skype goes down knocking over twenty million people offline!
Skype has had some major technical issues today knocking over twenty million users offline. People are were very surprised by this because Skype is supposed to be built on peer-to-peer technology which doesn't rely on centralised servers. This is true, for the actual communications aspect, but the sign-in procedure requires central servers, and it's these servers that initially failed. This problem then caused millions of nodes to become unavailable which then caused problems with the peer-to-peer layer as well. Skype have made a response on their blog, but that's currently overloaded as well, so I've pasted it in here:
 | Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.
Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you. What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations. Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal. |
| — Peter Parkes |
It's now many hours after the problem started, and still I'm being knocked offline every few minutes, so the problem is very major and taking them a long time to sort out. The number of users online is still only just over a million.
