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.
...'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.
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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.
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
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.