Cormac Moylan

A few days ago, on the 16th of August to be exact, Skype endured its longest downtime in its history.

Skype’s tag-line is to ‘Take a deep breath’ but I hope it wasn’t taken literally by its 200 million plus users.

Is it even possible to hold your breath for 48 hours?

Skype’s Villu Arak explains the exact reasons for the downtime in his post titled; ‘What Happened on August 16th’:

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly

Villu goes on to say that they have ‘identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software’ but he doesn’t mention if the user needs to download a revised release of the client software.

Some people may read Skype’s explanation of the downtime and they may think ‘ah yes, fecking Windows again’ but the the fact is that the bug which caused the system was in Skype’s code. It was simply triggered by Windows users.

I do wonder though if the same issue would have occurred if all the Mac and Linux users of Skype mass rebooted? I initially thought it was due to a new beta release of Skype for Mac as the network seemed to go down straight after I installed the beta, but everything is back up and running as before now.

When a ‘big player’ goes down, a lot of conspiracies spring up. Slashdot are reporting about the possibility that a Russian hacker was responsible for the downtime.

The claim is that they found a local buffer overflow vulnerability caused by sending a long string to the Skype authorization server.

Skype, have of course, denied this claim.

Techcrunch are reporting of a silver lining for Gizmo, Skype’s primary competitor for the online VoIP market share. TC illustrated Gizmo’s spike in traffic via some Alexa traffic stats (that graph also shows an increase for Grand Central, a Google owned telephony company in the US) .

While you can’t entirely rely on Alexa for bullet proof traffic stats, there is no doubting that they benefited from Skype’s outage. After approximately 12 hours of Skype downtime, I wandered over to Gizmo’s site and downloaded the Mac client for myself. I haven’t used it properly yet but it does allow VoIP calls to users on Google Talk, something which Skype can’t do.

I don’t think there is any other way for Mac users to talk to Google Talk users over VoIP as Google Talk has yet to be released on Mac.

Gizmo +1.

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