Andre Yoskowitz
22 Dec 2010 21:36
Skype, the popular Internet phone and video service, remains down for millions of global users, the second such widespread outage since 2007.
Beginning at around noon EST, many outraged took to Twitter to voice their complaints about not being able to sign in.
Skype acknowledged the outage very soon after: "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations. Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal — thanks for your continued patience."
In 2007, the service went down for a full 48 hours, but Skype has many more users now than it did then.
Just last month the company said it hit a significant milestone, 25 million concurrent users.
For those who are interested in what took the service down, Skype blogged it here:
Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.
Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.
What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal.