Massive Skype outage explained by company’s CIO; $1 service credit to affected users

By on Dec 29, 2010 at 11:02 PM
Services December 29, 2010

If you’re a frequent Skype user, you probably noticed, or heard about, a massive outage that the service was experiencing last week. In a blog post today, the VoIP company’s CIO, Lars Rabbe, explained exactly what happened to cause the interruption.

On Wednesday, December 22, a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overloaded. As a result of this overload, some Skype clients received delayed responses from the overloaded servers. In a version of the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152), the delayed responses from the overloaded servers were not properly processed, causing Windows clients running the affected version to crash.

Users running either the latest Skype for Windows (version 5.0.0.156), older versions of Skype for Windows (4.0 versions), Skype for Mac, Skype for iPhone, Skype on your TV, and Skype Connect or Skype Manager for enterprises were not affected by this initial problem.

However, around 50% of all Skype users globally were running the 5.0.0.152 version of Skype for Windows, and the crashes caused approximately 40% of those clients to fail. These clients included 25–30% of the publicly available supernodes, also failed as a result.

Along with its official mea culpa, Skype has begun sending emails to some of the affected users offering a $1 service credit. Skype asserts that it has taken measures to prevents such an outage from happening again.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1356861561 Facebook User

    My Skype for Mac was down.

  • Tech_User

    WTF? i was affected and i have skype for mac, yeah sure skype that $1 credit will buy me a minute of calling time VERY USEFUL

  • http://twitter.com/j_nathaniel Jason

    What constitutes “affected” in this case? I couldn’t sign in…does that mean Skype considers me to have been affected?

  • Lechero

    woooo!! $1. anyone wanna cyber?

  • R. Mutt

    Oh wow, one whole buck? Don’t spend it all in one place.

  • Amr G.

    Skype for Mac was affected… they clearly don’t know what was affected and what wasn’t, they just want to improve their image… Skype for mac was affected and the problem wasn’t solved until several hours after they announced that the service is back to normal!

  • serpentor

    @Facebook User, Tech_User, Amr. G

    Only version point152 for Windows was INITIALLY affected. Of the initial number that crashed, 40% were supernodes, which in turned caused your mac to version to be useless too.

  • Bob I.

    Hey, where’s my $1.00 credit for me though!..as the outage effected me!

  • Ay82

    Skype, please make sure that you go through and search out the affected Mac users as well from the outage. The issue here isn’t about the 1$, but rather that you should somehow make up for a very big lapse in service last week. I personally was in the middle of some very important discussions with friends who are abroad, and without Skype, I was left helpless for somewhere in the vicinity of 12 hours (I am NOT paying ATT 1.99$/min to make my calls or 0.50$/sms). On that note, does anyone else think that wireless carriers would make a LOT more money if they priced their international rates more competitively to other calling services?

  • http://twitter.com/PCPrime Ben Uecker

    My wife and I use skype. I am on a subscription and she isn’t. She got a 30 minute credit yesterday. I, on the other hand have received nothing.

    bummer.

  • Jonno

    I got a 30 min credit too….SCORE!!!!!

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