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back to article Skype still staggering after major blackout

Skype is the process of recovering from a major outage that left users across the world unable to log into the VoIP service on Wednesday. Many computers that act as supernodes, the systems that provide directory information on Skype, were taken offline "by a problem affecting some versions of Skype". As a result many Skype …

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  1. Anton Ivanov
    Flame

    The joy of distributed architecture

    Distributed architectures are wonderful when they work.

    And let "God stand between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" when they go belly up and you have to find a way to fix them.

    2 0
  2. Rob
    Go

    Ahh the bliss of silence...

    ... couldn't have come at better time, less marketing calls to deal with on the run up to xmas hols.

    1 0
  3. petur
    FAIL

    Reason to ditch skype

    This supernode crap is what made me ditch skype years ago. My pc became supernode overnight, and began consuming my complete upload allowance.

    I agree free stuff is give and take, certainly with a distributed environment, but saturating my internet connection without giving me *any* control over it was a bridge too far.

    And anyway, skype is closed as hell, I find standard SIP compliant VOIP much better - pick any provider or client, or even run your own server :)

    3 0
  4. mt1

    Flaw

    Thsi seems to be a fatal flaw in skype to be honest distributed should be able to cope

    1 1
    1. Anton Ivanov
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Down

      Nope

      It is a standard type of failure in distributed systems.

      If a distributed system failure is triggered by exceeding a capacity threshold and if clients perform some form of service discovery this is unfortunately a standard feature. Positive feedback loop. N clients trigger a bug in a node, node falls over, clients go to next node adding M clients in the process. N+M bottles sitting on the wall... and so on

      As a result distributed makes it only worse because you get all kinds of wonderful stuff starting from "standing waves" of collapse and finishing with dead zones. There is a way to design around each and every one of these, but it is not something people do before it has bitten them.

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  5. M Gale

    Yo yo

    Was briefly up at Midnight this morning. Prompted me to reply to the last article about Skype with a "maybe it's okay" message. Then it promptly went down again.

    It's saying "online" right now, was "offline" about 10 minutes ago. Wonder if it's going to stay up now?

    0 0
  6. spegru
    Big Brother

    Back online

    I was down for about 18hrs. Came back online at 3:15 GMT.

    Really scary stuff if this was caused by hacking or DDoS stuff

    I bet someone somewhere is doing high fives after this!

    0 0
  7. Door's opened
    Jobs Horns

    Yeah but, no but,

    I was quite amazed yesterday when some of my users reported the fault. Even though I could not connect (just like the rest of the world) I was still able to update Skype on my PC; now running 5.0 but still could not connect...

    How strange?

    Steve Jobs because he is evil.

    0 0
  8. Doug Glass
    Go

    Skype The Cloud

    Duuuuhhhhhh.....

    0 0
  9. Rogerborg
    Troll

    Can't they just move it into The Cloud?

    All this technobabble about "supernodes" seems awfully complicated. Surely that should be Somebody Else's Problem?

    0 0
  10. JaitcH
    Pint

    Great service record, especially considering the traffic loads

    It's only when you lose something, it's value becomes appreciated.

    So it is with Skype, a good reliable service that provides so much for so little.

    2 0
  11. nsld
    FAIL

    still borked today

    call drops, on and off line etc etc

    0 0
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