Great. Skype is down.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/12/22/great-skype-is-down/

by b-boy-b • 16 years ago

102 66 16 years ago

thenextweb.com

Jayasimhan• 16 years ago

may be we need this :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

trucious• 16 years ago

Somehow I knew it would be this before clicking

lallysingh• 16 years ago

Yup, I was about to have a call with my advisor (across the atlantic), and neither of us could log in. I tried on an android phone and a linux box.

GBKS• 16 years ago

I just needed to have a call with two people. For some reason, I could talk on Skype with one of them. The other one I called in via Gmail Voice Chat, so everybody could hear each other. Worked out great.

robfitz• 16 years ago

I'm okay with this. Their last downtime was 3 years ago.

I still get robotic 'network busy' announcements from my mobile phone network, and I pay an awful lot more for that (under an infinitely more draconian contract) than I do for Skype.

j79• 16 years ago

We switched over to Skype as our primary tool for inter-office communication(s) a few years ago. It's been a fun day.

I've actually resorted to sending out e-mails (like it was 2001, hah!)

The lack of distractions is quite nice, though. =) It's amazing how productive everyone seems to be (when we're not complaining about skype being down...)

jnovek• 16 years ago

Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

rayvega• 16 years ago

>> ...This is getting tiresome; trusted services going down...

That statement from the OP rubbed me the wrong way. Trusted services going down are a fact of life. It is going to happen. I agree Skype's last outage was three years ago which is a good track record compared to more traditional services that you might pay a lot more for. Other "trusted" services like electricity, water, heat, transportation fail from time to time even in the most modern of cities. The key is how a company responds to it, triages it, and communicates it to their customers (i.e. with frequent updates)

Hopefully, Skype provides a postmortem describing what happened and how they fixed it.

vital101• 16 years ago

The statements by the OP rubbed me the wrong way as well. We always preach here that you should have a backup system in case a service fails, why should this be any different for real life? Network not available? Store updates locally and transmit them when it is. Skype down? Find an alternative for a few hours until it's back up. It's not the end of the world. Think of it as an opportunity to explore new products.

Note: I know some people rely on Skype for their businesses, and that it sucks that it went out. All I'm saying is that most people should have some sort of contingency plan for when this situation occurs.

krsgoss• 16 years ago

Agreed. I get enormous benefit from Skype for next to nothing so the criticisms seem somewhat unjustified since most people fall into the same bucket (free.) It's still an excellent service IMO.

mmastrac• 16 years ago

This is the first time Skype has been down for our distributed company. In that same time, my internet has failed a half-dozen times and my VoIP phone a couple of times. Skype is definitely a reliable service - I'm interested in knowing what happened here to take it down.

borism2• 16 years ago

you're welcome.

it's a pretty bad outage though. we're fixing it.

taylorbuley• 16 years ago

Any hints as to the problem? Affecting Global Index or something else?

rexreed• 16 years ago

What's the story with Skype planning to charge for video calls?

kogus• 16 years ago

Is it still true that parts of Skype are written in Delphi? If so, can you comment on which part(s), and why that choice was made?

jessriedel2• 16 years ago

My cell phone service has never failed in my home.

jimboyoungblood• 16 years ago

My AT&T iPhone has never failed to fail in San Francisco.

zeedotme• 16 years ago

honestly, you're right. It was just my initial reaction and the first words to come to mind when I wrote the title in my haste to get it out.

ams61102• 16 years ago

My landline at home has never* had an outage in 27 years.

* that I'm aware of

kscaldef• 16 years ago

My landline has outages. For example, just a couple months ago, workers from the phone company intentionally disconnected my phone line while doing some tree trimming. Didn't even bother to knock on the door and let me know they were going to do it.

jamesbkel• 16 years ago

Where do you live? I live in the Northeast US and I can remember multiple outages for my landline over the course of 20 winters and several blizzards. Roughly 5, wasn't really keeping track.

bobbyi• 16 years ago

Landlines are from a different era of expected reliability. They carry their own power because it was considered too unreliable to depend on your home's electricity.

ars• 16 years ago

You've never had a bad connection? Or you dial a number and it doesn't go through and you have to try again? Or no trunk lines available when calling internationally?

qq66• 16 years ago

No phones that I could find were working on the morning of September 11th, landline or cellular.

michaelchisari2• 16 years ago

Although generally Skype is very reliable, I think this does make a case for open, distributed systems, at least when it comes to something that many, many people and organizations are reliant on.

jedsmith• 16 years ago

People make this argument every time something quietly critical fails or doesn't work the way they want it to. As a recent example, look at the completely false FUD about ICANN "seizing domains"; there were nearly instant calls for an "open, decentralized" DNS.

It's almost as if these proposed solutions wait for the slightest problem to occur, then everybody rushes to pitch a Tor utopia.

I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many reasons. Peer-to-peer anything comes with its own truckload of problems, and would do more harm here than good (as with the DNS).

michaelchisari2• 16 years ago

That's not exactly true, usually people are already working on distributed systems, and use the failure of centralized systems as an opportunity to point them out.

I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many reasons.

"Greatly fear" seems hyperbolic. What do you find fearsome about a decentralized Skype?

would do more harm here than good

Such as? I think the adoption of Jabber for IM has worked quite well so far. If Facebook goes down, I don't have to worry about my Google Chat not working.

What problems do you foresee in terms of decentralizing audio/video along with instant messaging?

mike-cardwell3• 16 years ago

We already have a distributed voip platform. "distributed" in the same way as email is at least. Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. I'm not sure what Tor has to do with anything.

And as michaelchisari said, we already have distributed IM via the magic of XMPP federation.

mfukar2• 16 years ago

But spreading FUD about decentralized/p2p systems is OK, right?

koenigdavidmj• 16 years ago

With Skype, only the login/online status service is actually centralised. Actual calls are peer-to-peer.

muppetman• 16 years ago

I just woke up (I'm in New Zealand), read all the "Skype is down" stories and logged into Skype without issue.

Either I'm really lucky, or it's recovering.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. After being online for 15 minutes, it's gone offline again.

noarchy• 16 years ago

Skype is so rarely down that this did take me by surprise. Obviously they've been doing something right. Every other service that I use, even electricity, has been down more often. Heck, my favourite games are down every week, even every day.

AgentConundrum• 16 years ago

I didn't know what the hell was going on. I got a message a couple hours ago saying that Skype had crashed. Not that it couldn't connect or anything, but a "Unhandled Exception blew the sucker up. Feel free to totally fail to load this in Visual Studio" message.

I didn't try to restart it, since I very rarely use it anyway, but I did find it quite odd since I've never seen that happen to Skype.

pclark• 16 years ago

I actually rebooted my router, assuming that was why I couldn't connect to Skype. Don't think it's ever been offline before for me.

dholowiski• 16 years ago

Leo Laporte is going to be pissed.

yock• 16 years ago

The Android app is getting loads of negative reviews today from people who think the app doesn't work.

goombastic• 16 years ago

Upgrade to algorithm in progress... probably. Or some government getting a tap.

ABrandt• 16 years ago

Can anyone suggest a quick alternative to skype conference calling? Today is the one day I actually had an important use for this and it goes down...

A phone line could work, but is not ideal due to distance. Thanks.

UPDATE: Skype just signed me in. Anyone else have this happen? UPDATE2: Back down again after only a few minutes. Hopefully they're close to a fix.

mMark• 16 years ago

At less than half of what I would be charged for my regular landline for calls to China, the UK, and NA I think it's fair to give them some slack and let them have a few hours to repair things.

dennisgorelik2• 16 years ago

It's taking Skype too long to fix the outage.

ankimal• 16 years ago

A tweet doing the rounds is "Julian Assange is trying to make a private phone call so they took down Skype."

I dont pay for skype so I cant really complain if its down. But what about those who pay? I would be really pissed if I had a ton of skype credit and couldn't call.

peterwwillis2• 16 years ago

Haven't searched much yet - does this have anything to do with the Skype protocol encryption being cracked and the people responsible leaking POC code before they release it to the world this month at 27C3?

mfukar2• 16 years ago

It was already released back in August. I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, though; it must have been a very valid concern before Skype made any announcements.

peterwwillis2• 16 years ago

Heh, well it's going to be a concern again after this month. IIRC they said they are going to release a more complete tool to let you explore the Skype network in general (besides just decoding packets for sniffing). In theory you can penetrate corporate networks wherever there is a Skype client running, and if they found a bug in an old version of Skype it's possible they could send a worm through the network and take out a lot of machines.

But maybe it is more likely that it was just an innocent bug. I just asked the question because it seemed like a big coincidence that Skype should go down right before these guys do a big exposee on the protocol and encryption.

technomancy• 16 years ago

I've been really enjoying using Mumble for voip pair programming today during the Skype downtime. It's really easy to set up a server, and it has a lot more flexibility as far as mic sensitivity. I find the latter to be very useful when working in a noisy coffee shop or outside during the summer.

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/

nitrogen• 16 years ago

Mumble, while designed as a game chat system, is excellent for any kind of audio conferencing. It can be configured with very low latency (lower, in fact, than shouting down the hall) and CD quality audio.

Great. Skype is down.

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