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Skype Slowly Restores Service To Users
CWmike writes "Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday."
It totally classifies as epic fail.
I've worked in the telecom industry and I've seen the type of testing they do on their products, and I've worked in the software industry and I've seen the type of testing they do on their products...
It will be a long long time before I give up my hardline from ATT and rely only on VOIP as my main contact with the world. or anything more than I'm bored - let's see who I can talk to....
A LONG time....
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
Operator: Can I help you?
Skype: YES, all of our peer-to-peer servers just went down. We have 23 million users offline right now.
Operator: Have you tried turning it off and then turning it on again?
Sabotage by Comcast and AT&T. It's clear that they're scared that net neutrality bill is a big threat to business in the land line department... so the new plan is to make skype totally unreliable by sabotage. Eventually all the skype users will realize that VOIP is a bunch of crap and they'll go back to using land lines. It's so obvious!!
/tinfoilhat
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Just the other day I needed to call 911 and I couldn't!
They're posting about the fact that it's back up, but I never saw a story saying anything about it going down.
Somewhere there's a junior sysadmin going "so if this script didn't push the latest build onto the test servers, where did it get pushed to?"
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
I just turned it on, and already got about 3 chain mail style messages about Skype having to purge its invalid user base, so please forward this to 15 of your friends.
So, the Internet is the same as ever.
and remote: there exists a real possibility that both his internet and cell phone service don't work during the same period he needs to call an ambulance. Some people value preparedness over trendiness.
damaged by dogma
I took a very angry phone call from my clients CEO yesterday morning who was trying to log onto Skype for some a conference call with a few of his staff members in another state.
After confirming that their Firewall/Proxy was under Christmas embargo, no changes requests had been processed and the ports were open I checked the Skype twitter feed and noticed the service was out.
It still took a few attempts at explaining that it wasn't our fault and there was nothing I could do to access their network which was offline, I eventually sent him the link to the Skype twitter feed to shut him up.
Anyone have opinions on voxox?
I wonder, did PennyTalk, OoVoo, Line2, and Google Talk all pick up more traffic while this was down?
Can't believe no one's mentioned this yet.
All Skype does is connect users and punch holes in NATs. Take something at least standard (like SIP), if not peer-to-peer, and you don't have massive failures just because one VOIP provider goes down.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Currently all POTS calls *are* VOIP calls!
Good gods, how did *that* get modded "Informative"? (Yah, yah, pretend I'm new here.)
POTS calls, by definition, start on a line with Plain Old Telephone Service. 48 volts, analog, more or less the same thing that's been in use for roughly a century now.
Now, once you get to the CO, you're almost certainly going to go digital. That digital channel is still commonly pure TDM and circuit-switched (especially if you don't leave the exchange). You have a 64 Kbit/sec timeslice dedicated to your call all the way. Or it may go into an ATM network ("A technology that lets telephone companies turn your WAN problems into something they can tariff") and be cell-switched. Or, yes, it may go into a packet-switched IP network. Maybe even the Internet, if you're using a cheap LD carrier.
But "all"?? No. Not by a long shot.
Even if your call *does* go VoIP, you may still never leave the domain of the PSTN, where things like QoS can be enforced end-to-end. The Internet's generally a "unreliable, best effort" service. Different operators do different things, and all you can do is plug in somewhere and hope for the best. A telco deploying VoIP as a backhaul internally is a very different beast.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The outage lasted for an hour or two.
It was possible to make paid phone calls, but the free voice chat was impossible for the 7 to 10 million people that were using Skype, during that short time.
Yes , I have been affected too. The outage forced us to move over to gTalk, which still has lover voice quality. Surprisingly, the face-book chat was very slow during that time too. Very coincidental.
You know....it takes a while to do those NSA upgrades to monitor all of the growing phone calls placed by Skype users.
Just be patient as Homeland Security completes those upgrades.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
My point was that most calls are currently packet-switched. They even in fact share the fiber that carry general internet traffic, only with additional QoS enforcements.
Can you cite a source on the claim that most calls are currently packet-switched? While it's been some years since I've been up close to that part of the IT field, I don't think there's been enough time to physically change over that many phone switches, let alone the money or telco inclination.
Note that just because a call is running down the same fiber as an IP feed doesn't mean the voice is packet-switched. It is (or was) much more common to find the IP feeds existing as channels within a TDM trunk. A given stand carries a buttload of DS0 channels, any one of which might be a voice call, or might be assigned to data usage.
Note also that I'm not considering ATM packet-switched, although some do. The uniform, small size of the transmission unit, and complicated control protocols, mean it doesn't really behave like a traditional packet-switched network. (Which is, after all, the point.)
One other thing: Telephony over the public Internet has seen a huge increase in usage. Mobile telephony has seen an even huger increase, and I'm told many of those are IP-based. It could be that "most calls" are VoIP now because most calls have moved off the traditional PSTN to "new" public telephone networks. Which does count, I suppose, but I think the context of the OP was more about the traditional PSTN.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Last night I was running Skype on a publicly routable IP address, which probably made my machine a supernode candidate. I noticed a lot of idle traffic between my Skype client and quite a few IP addresses within the Amazon EC2 compute cloud. I'd never seen that before. Usually my background traffic is to random cable and DSL addresses. My guess is that Amazon is where Skype brought up their "extra mega-supernodes". EC2 is handy for things like that.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilgongo/5282908367
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Soft-switches are more the norm than the traditional.
Trusting Skype "fortunately-nobody-does-it-like-us P2P" for an emergency call? Well, at least it might get you a Darwin award... :/
As POTS replacement, I use (and would recommend) JustVoip coupled with E911 service from SIPgate (and a tiny UPS for the ATA and router/modem) => true emergency dialing for $2/mo.
Plus, naturally, others calls remain way cheaper than Skype given how many SIP providers there are to choose from...