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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
That's why there's Twitter: "@911, need help, was watching football game, now choking on a pretzel, my address is 1600 penn" [140 char maximum reached]
Disregard my previous post. I expected the outage on Wednesday story to have been posted on Wednesday, not this morning. My mistake.
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?
That's nothing. A friend got stuck in the toilet in a lone cabin - the lock broke or something (the rest of us camped out in tents a few miles out).
So, since she had no gadgets on her, she started crying for help out of the window. Some kids heard her, brought an old lady in some hours. The kids didn't come back, the lady couldn't help, and our friend was reluctant to be alone (it was getting late in the afternoon), so she tried to have the old lady make a call on her cell.
There was no reception in the area, and the old lady apparently has never used a cellphone anyway, BUT ... but they somehow managed to send an email to a common friend of ours on a different continent - using the intermittent and weak WiFi that was available from somewhere.
So, the friend got the mail (written by the old lady, so pretty incoherent and scary-sounding) in the middle of the night, then looked up my phone, called me and asked me could we find a better time for pranks.
So, we went to check out what's up and had to break the door.
/ true story
/ still no idea where that wifi came from
/ cool story, too
0118 999 881 999 119 7253
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.
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.
Only difficult if you're actually behind a NAT.
Just one more reason to stop pussyfooting around with NAT and actually switch to IPv6.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!