After a daylong outage that left untold millions of Skype users high and dry, the CEO of the peer-to-peer chat service apologized, promised that service is slowly but surely being restored, and announced that credits may be in the offing for paying users. The root cause of Wednesday's massive Skype failure is still a mystery, however.
In a blog post and in a just-posted YouTube video, Skype CEO Tony Bates said that as of Thursday morning, about 16.5 million users were back online — still only about 80 percent of the number you'd normally expect to see using Skype on a given weekday morning, but greatly improved from Wednesday, when as few as 1.6 million users were connected.
Bates said that Skype's "core services," such as audio, video and text chat, had been "stabilized" after engineers rejiggered a series of servers to act as "supernodes," or Skype clients that help one Skype user locate and connect to another.
That's the good news. The bad news is that Skype engineers ended up repurposing some servers used for other Skype features — namely group video chat and offline instant messaging — to shore up the "core" video and audio chat services. For now, that means anyone hoping to engage in group video chat or send offline IMs is out of luck.
Bates then apologized for the meltdown, the worst at Skype since 2007, when Skype users were left without Skype chat for two days. That outage was later traced to a "massive" number of Skype-connected PCs rebooting in unison after Microsoft issued an unusually large number of Windows patches at once.
"We know this has caused a major impact for many of you, and we apologize profusely for this," Bates said in the video.
OK, so what caused this latest outage? Bates told TechCrunch that "we haven't ruled anything out."
For now, all we know for sure is that a large number of these so-called supernodes — which are really just a bunch of regular Skype desktop clients that act as virtual user directories, helping a Skype client in one far-flung region of the Internet locate another — went down en masse early Wednesday. (For a better explanation of how Skype's supernodes work, click right here.)
As Bates noted in the YouTube video, Skype engineers were forced to compensate for the lost supernodes by creating their own "mega-supernodes" — cobbled together, apparently, using servers that normally handle Skype features like group video chat and offline IM.
As TechCrunch observes, that's probably just a "short-term solution" until Skype traces the root cause of Wednesday's outage and cooks up a permanent solution.
In the meantime, Skype is "investigating" the possibility of offering credits to paying Skype users (yes, many people pay to use Skype for voice calls to regular phone numbers, myself included) whose service was disrupted Wednesday, Bates said, adding that details for issuing the credits still needed to be worked out.
So, what should we do the next time Skype goes down? Resort to communicating, like, face to face or something?
Never fear; PC Magazine has drawn up a list of eight Skype alternatives, including AOL Instant Messenger, Gmail Voice and Video Chat, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo!'s own Messenger client.
0 comments:
Post a Comment