Slashdot Mirror
Skype Outage Hits Users Worldwide
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that millions of Skype phone users worldwide couldn't make calls or were dropped in mid-conversation because of a network connection failure that began about 9 AM Wednesday PST. 'For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of,' says Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. 'Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide.' In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology, shouldn't see an outage, but that is not really the case — the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. 'The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business,' writes Om Malik. 'If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage.'"
It's still ongoing right now, albeit intermittently. I'm seeing drop-outs on the distribution of my skype status (despite my local 'net connection being fine).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Apparently this article was published too soon. Those year end reviews should include the last few weeks of the year before.
Increasingly more and more communication is becoming centralised. People use Facebook to send messages rather than email, Skype rather than direct voip calls, Twitter to keen people informed. Even email relies on central webservers. Gone is the days that typical emails would travel from your computer to the other persons directly, or at most via their local ISP.
Aside from being exactly what the internet is designed to avoid, it's also handing control to corporations that are
1) Too big for governments to influence
2) Too big to fail
I for one hope for more large scale outages, hopefully it will stem the tide, but like Cnut, we can't stop the inevitable.
This is your response to the Net Neutrality Bill? Very clever...
Question: do torrents still work, or did the bastards turn that off too?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
...'parallel to serial to parallel' and 'optical to electrical to optical' :)
Seriously though, as technology improves it often leads to 'old concepts' being re-examined and implemented in a new manner that is usually more effective than the initial parts.
While not always true a lot of technology has sprung up like this, especially in the computer world.
Halfway through yesterday my Skype stopped working, just like everybody else's.
It then tried to reconnect, and out of the blue gave me a pop-up saying "Skypenames2.exe wants to use Skype" with the options "Allow access" or "Deny access."
This naturally set off a few alarm bells, but as it turns out it isn't malware or a virus, just a poorly named Skype component. It allows you to click telephone links in IE or a Mozilla-based browser and make direct phone calls using Skype. Personally I don't want or need that kind of integration, so I declined.
Just find the Verizon/ATT/Sprint/ executive with a smug face and a sheepish grin. He did it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
After convincing my boss and *his* boss about the benefits of Skype, yesterday was the day I was going to demo it to show how it works, benefits, video, etc.
Suffice to say, the demo did not go well.
It’s worth noting that our enterprise product, Skype Connect , is working normally
From: http://www.skype.com/content/skype/intl/en-us/StatusUpdate.html?cm_mmc=PXTW|0700_B6-_-downtime-20101222-2
the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication
I've always been amazed by the large amount of time it takes to be authenticated from a Skype server, compared to connections to other providers - time that suggests there is something wrong with their infrastructure.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
My Ekiga account which uses the much more "open" and widely supported Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is still up and running. By "widely supported" I mean that many more applications support it (while Skype is a proprietary form of VoIP), not that more people use it.
Time to laugh of all my friends that are now trying to use Skype! (soon I'll be receiving messages through MSN - not IRC or GTalk - asking why Skype stopped working)
http://gbl08ma.com
And how much control do you have over the telcoms?
At my office we our phones went out for four hours. A construction crew cut a phone cable. Two days latter the same crew did it again!
I would never use skype as the only method of telcom but it could be handy if we could intergrate it into our phone system so customers could call us on Skype and have it go right into our phone system.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Basil?
Oregon = state
Oregano = seasoning
Hmmm, I wonder if this ties in with the fact that last night my computer started spewing tens of thousands of packets on port 443 (https). My guess is that it became a Spype supernode. Needless to say, the network admins were not very happy about this. I couldn't find a way to disable it in Ubuntu, so it's gonna be goodbye Skype for now, unless someone can suggest a solution.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Skype is blaming its peer-to-peer interconnection system for the problem. In an official blog post, the company said: 'Our engineers are creating new 'mega-supernodes' as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal.' http://www.itworld.com/networking/131617/skype-blames-service-outage-supernode-problem. And as of 8 a.m. Thursday, Skype said about 2/3 of users still can't log in. http://www.itworld.com/networking/131655/skype-says-two-thirds-users-still-cant-log
yes, but Basil is faulty
I think you're making an overly broad and general statement about a very situation specific topic. For *many* businesses *much* of the time, a service like Google Documents and Skype provides adequate levels of QOS, and may be considerably better than that same company could do on its own. If you have a ten or twenty person business with a relatively small IT budget, Google Docs is likely better than what you could do for yourself. By the time you pay a specialist IT guy, buy servers, buy backup solutions, buy an office suite ( you could save this cost by using Open Source, but frankly office suites are one area that I'd rather just pay for it. I've never cared much for OO.org or whatever they call themselves now that they forked) for every workstation... You're talking a huge investment. Google will do it cheaper, likely better, and if you have to deal with the occasional outage, well it's not likely to destroy your business if it's down for a couple hours. Anyway it's just as likely that your local file server might go down for a few hours (or even a few days if you paid for the cheap support package).
Now if you're the sort of business where any downtime is costing you a fortune, then you're in a different boat and Google may not be the best choice. If you've already made the infrastructure investment, then a lot of the reason for using Google goes away. If you've got the in house expertise to handle this stuff for minimal expense, then maybe Google isn't a good idea. If you're a big enough operation that you can develop your own economies of scale, it may make more sense for you to do so... There's lots of reasons to not use Google, but just to globally say that anyone who ever suggests it should be made a janitor is quite foolish as well.
As a side note, if you're the kind of business where any down time will cost you a fortune, and you haven't paid for redundant *everything* (Internet connection, mail server, file server, web server, power, HVAC... and on and on), you're fooling yourself thinking that you avoid outages by not using Google.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Slashdot is a news aggregator. They don't report news. They don't have reporters or journalists.
You have a 4 digit UID.. how do you not know this?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The best circuit analogy I've seen to this switching between a distinct pair of alternatives is a delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter (or sigma-delta converter, depending on your dialect). This converter takes an analog signal input, but the output is only one of two values, 1 or 0. The long-term average of the output pulses is equal to the input analog voltage, but at any given instant the output is at one of the rails (1 or 0).
It's like saying that at any instant the US government is controlled by Democrats or Republicans, but the long-term average (representing the input to the system, i.e., the wishes of the people) is somewhere between these extremes. Or the old argument about whether a company should be organized around functions (having, e.g., an engineering department, a sales department, etc., each handling all products) or products (having, e.g., a Product A division, a Product B division, etc., each handling all functions). Each new CEO switches the company from one to the other, while the optimum is some unattainable blend of the two. (Don't mention matrix management.)
Interestingly, one of the most prized features of delta-sigma converters is that their noise is "shaped", that is, pushed to higher frequencies out of band, so it can be easily filtered. This greatly increases the performance attainable with a given technology. Every time I hear protest voices in democratic governments, or organizational griping by corporate salarymen, I always pause to wonder if I am listening to this feature of the converter, too. And whether I should filter it.
Your spelling is fawlty
Open source alternative to skype? Skype isn't just software! Who would pay for all the links to national telecoms etc... ?
America, Home of the Brave.
Agreed! Especially when there are tons of reputable SIP providers to choose from, why use Skype? :-\
It's gonna take a shit-ton of powerful marketing for Skype to overpower common sense and break into an established, competitive market of open options...maybe Cisco can give them some advice.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
All the major telcos have switched or are switching to "Soft Switches" meaning they are doing away with their old EWSD, DMS100 etc... hardware based switches and converting all their customers to Voip, then trunking it back to their headquarters where they have a software based switch. This saves them a lot of money but also centralizes the switching system and can lead to huge outages. I've seen them happen, so large than nearly the entire customer base of a company is out of service. But Customers are used to rare outages and if all the phones in town go out once or twice a year people chalk it up as "normal." What they don't realize is that it wasn't just their town, it was hundreds of citys all over the country. Even regulatory authorities treat each city outage separately so there's no real record of just how big the outages are.
Looks to me like a classic DoS against the "supernodes". Probably why they, according to Skype, started disappearing. In the Skype architecture, basically if you run an instance on a machine not behind a firewall or NAT, chances are that you are running a supernode and contributing to the Skype p2p network. Your IP is distributed across the network for referece.
I happen to have a machine that runs a supernode and about 12 hours ago I had real trouble accessing the machine while Skype was consuming 99% of CPU cycles. Incidentally, the same machine has an Apache listening on port 80 and SVN on 443. They were being flooded as well, due to the fact that Skype commonly listens on those ports as well (not in my case, due to my setup). Apache logs for the day was over 10GiB, containing the evidence. Apparently, Apache was taking the pounding much better, remaining responsive.
This seems to be a siginificant weakness in the Skype architecture as they are relying on 3rd parties for their core infrastructure. Incidentally, this also makes easy targets of guys that contribute to the network as supernodes.
A snippet from the Apache log:
[Thu Dec 23 13:52:50 2010] [error] [client *.*.*.*] (22)Invalid argument: Cannot map \xd0\x15X\xbf\xf9\x99J\x19\xb7;P(\xe2(\x98\xfe\xb8"\x07[N_^\xda\xb5\xe9\x8ef\xb0\xe4\x82\xaa\x9dMZ\x9d5G\x04\x8f\x11W\xf8d\x0c\x819\xb1\xc6\x81\xe9n\xc5\xd9 to file
[Thu Dec 23 13:52:50 2010] [error] [client *.*.*.*] (22)Invalid argument: Cannot map \xd0\x15X\xbf\xf9\x99J\x19\xb7;P(\xe2(\x98\xfe\xb8"\x07[N_^\xda\xb5\xe9\x8ef\xb0\xe4\x82\xaa\x9dMZ\x9d5G\x04\x8f\x11W\xf8d\x0c\x819\xb1\xc6\x81\xe9n\xc5\xd9 to file
[Thu Dec 23 13:52:50 2010] [error] [client *.*.*.*] Invalid URI in request \xd0\x15X\xbf\xf9\x99J\x19\xb7;P(\xe2(\x98\xfe\xb8"\x07[N_^\xda\xb5\xe9\x8ef\xb0\xe4\x82\xaa\x9dMZ\x9d5G\x04\x8f\x11W\xf8d\x0c\x819\xb1\xc6\x81\xe9n\xc5\xd9
Slashdot gets "scooped" like this quite frequently, but that's not really the point. It's meant to be a forum where, in an ideal situation, users can discuss and expand their insight into such news. Sure, a lot of material of tangential, marginal or no relevance does come up, but that's part of what makes the openness of Slashdot so good. On a good day, anyway.
In my case, the first "contact" was being unable to login to Skype, then finding a newspaper article about the outage, which saved me the trouble of investigating whether the problem was anything I could fix. No biggie.
Skype doesn't suck any more than it did yesterday. OK, well I guess maybe it does, since at the moment it isn't working.
But there has been no deception: when we sign up, we are made completely aware that Skype is not a replacement for a permanent line.
If you are running a business that uses Skype (I don't say "depends" because it would be too stupid to build your business around something over which you have so little control), you should consider having at least one "fixed" line or at least a working and tested SIP setup.
In my case, since I use Skype for personal purposes, the outage isn't the end of the world. It could have happened at a better time of the year, but I have alternatives: I have a SIP handset hanging off the back of my modem and I have my mobile phone. And, of course if I have to, I could run a SIP client via my tethered phone or USB wireless dongle. Or I could get off my ass and do something radical like write a fucking letter. Whatever.
But I'm getting away from my point, which is that Skype is too good a service for me to abandon it because of one day's hiccup. Having the combination of an IM and VOIP client integrated in a product that already has near-universal "headspace awareness" among my non-geeky acquaintances is valuable. Sure, there are alternatives for each of these (and maybe both, for all I know), but my friends have to know about them too for them to be any use.
So hopefully, when the dust settles after this outage, the Skype developers will be able to use this experience to build more robustness into what is already a great product.
Getting back to the issue: Has anyone yet explained what the cause of this outage is? If Skype's techs have indeed been working on it all day, they must (one hopes) have at least some idea of the cause by now.
Que?
I can log in but the calls don't go through. They just ring twice then silence... so I think they have problems in addition to authentication.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The question would be - what took down the Supernodes? Skype uses a number of them, not all owned by Skype. Kill enough of them and the remaining supernodes have so much traffic hitting them they go offline too. It's a cascade problem and one Skype is apparently trying to fix by bringing up more of their own nodes to bolster the network while public nodes rebuild. This still begs the question - why did they begin to fail in the first place?
A couple of things come to mind...
1) Code has been released that supposedly reveals the underlying crypto that Skype uses for their traffic management. Did someone use this to somehow crash nodes? If so, how? I came home to find my Skype client toes up with an app crash and it's NOT the newer 5.x code that's been recently released so WTF? My Skype client NEVER crashes and is behind a NAT so this would seem to indicate someone was using their protocols maybe? Anyone know anything? Anyone else have a client crash like this?
2) Was there a zero day exploit in Skype code that allowed for a DOS and was then used to somehow kill supernodes and maybe other nodes directly? Skype admits to some sort of a bug but gives no details!
3) Skype uses some sort of centralized authentication server or service, blocking Skype on a network is as easy as blocking access to that service. Did someone attack that? Did it go down on it's own? I don't think this would have killed off online clients though - how often does Skype authenticate?
Skype needs to give some answers. If this is a bug in deployed code we need to know if it exposes machines to exploits and they need to patch ASAP. The answers they have given so far haven't said much of anything - why?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org