Status Problems Break Skype For Many Users; Quick Fix Promised

Many Skype users have been affected this morning by a glitch which has rendered the service unusable or only semi-usable. The BBC says that problems have been reported in Japan, the UK, and Australia, and that Skype support staff have promised a "quick fix." A message on the Skype page says "f you're signed in to Skype, you will not be able to change your status and your contacts will all show as offline even if they are online. As a result, you won't be able to start Skype calls to them.. A small number of messages to group chats are not being delivered, but in most cases you can still instant message your contacts.. If you aren't signed in to Skype, you may be experiencing difficulty when attempting to sign in. Any changes to your Skype account such as your Credit balance or your profile details might take a little while to be displayed."

Comments

Broken since 09:00 UTC

[Erik Hensema]

Skype has been broken since 09:00 UTC. That's about 5 hours now. I think we can safely say that the quick fix didn't happen.

Re:Broken since 09:00 UTC

[NotInHere]

Damn, their uptime this year will be less than 99,94%!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

Re:Broken since 09:00 UTC

[Anonymous Coward]

5 hours is a long time to find, fix, test, and deploy a fix in your mind? Seriously?.

If I recall correctly, Gmail once went down due to some kind of a severe bug. The fix took 5 minutes.

No, fix to the main issue was not made in 5 minutes, but the service was back and operational in 5 minutes. Their automated malfunction detection reverted to a previous software version.

The end result is still the same: only 5 minutes of downtime for users, which qualifies as "fixed".

I think we can safely say that you don't develop software for a living, or at least that if you do then you are completely incompetent.

Or perhaps he just is familiar with system administration.

Re:Broken since 09:00 UTC

[mrchaotica]

5 hours is a long time to find, fix, test, and deploy a fix in your mind? Seriously?.

No, but it is a long time to fail over to the redundant systems, roll back whatever configuration change you did last, or that kind of thing.

I think we can safely say that you don't develop software for a living, or at least that if you do then you are completely incompetent.

Everything about this is wrong.

First of all, the issue is operations, not development. Even if development screwed up, it shouldn't matter because the deployment would be rolled back. (Actually, ideally the deployment wouldn't happen in the first place because QA would have found the issue first and told development to go back and fix their shit.)

Second, if you're in operations and you don't think 5 hours is a long time to get the service back up then you are completely incompetent!

Re:Broken since 09:00 UTC

[Jawnn]

Damn, their uptime this year will be less than 99,94%!

Three nines. Whoop-de-doo. I'm just glad I was able to easily derail the suggestion that "We should just use Skype for all of the business phones..." If I hadn't, I'd still get to say, "I told you it was a bad idea", but there's always that look that says, "Well, you should have told us harder", when the IT prophecy cometh true. Ya know?
Setting aside the mobile networks (who still do a pretty good job when it comes to availability), I'll wager that the PSTN has an uptime of 5 nines, at least.

Re:Distributed realtime chat ..

[Anonymous Coward]

It has not been distributed peer-to-peer for a while.

Microsoft turned it into a easy backdoor for NSA years ago.

Re:Distributed realtime chat ..

[joaommp]

The login and status change part needs always some central components. The comunication between two users, however, needs not.