Skype Outage Threatens Millions Of Christmas Day Calls

The ongoing outage issues with Skype is threatening millions of people’s ability to make contact with their loved ones over the Christmas break.

Skype suffered a serious server outage on Wednesday 4pm (GMT), which according to its blogger-in-chief Peter Parkes was because a failure due to Skype’s “supernodes”. Supernodes are clusters of computer servers linked by peer-to-peer networking software. Skype utilises millions of connections between supernodes, which are virtual phone directories, and phones.

Over the intervening period Skype made progress to restore the service and as of 2pm GMT yesterday, Parkes said there were roughly five million people online, which was only around 30 percent of what the company would expect at that particular time.

Stabilised Service

Then, at 4pm GMT yesterday, Parkes issued an update and said that the number had doubled to more than 10 million, or 60 percent of total users Skype typically sees online then. That meant Skype remained unavailable for about 40 percent of users, nearly 24 hours after the initial crash.

In an effort to show how serious Skype is taking the issue, its CEO Tony Bates issued an update via a video posting yesterday in which he said that Skype’s service had stabilised. “”We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience users are having,” he said.

He said that the service is now at roughly 90 percent of normal user volumes. There has been no new update as of 2pm Christmas Eve.

“Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls,” he warned. “We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation.”

He added that, while audio, video and IM are running normally, the group video calling and offline IM are not available yet.

Christmas Calls

Skype is a hugely popular voice over IP (VoIP) service that is used by an estimated 560 million people around the world to make free and low-cost long-distance calls from their PCs and phones.

The services are especially popular at Christmas time, when many people with friends and family overseas or other parts of the country, utilise the free computer-to-computer (or video) calls, to keep in touch or even to open presents together.

The fact that calls and even video is now said to be working will come as a relief, although those people hoping to have a video conference with multiple relatives or friends at the same time could be disapointed.

Promises Refund

Bates also said it would issue refunds to those unable to make calls during the 30-hour shut down. The company will reportedly send its Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users a Skype Credit voucher via email. The voucher should give users approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines around in the world.

“For our active subscribers, we will credit you with a week’s extra subscription service,” said Bates. “It may take a few days but, once implemented, it will be applied from your next renewal date. Again, we sincerely apologise to all of you for this service outage and the inconvenience it has caused. We know how important it is for Skype to be available, so you can connect to your friends, family and colleagues.”

Skype has usually been reliable. Indeed, it last suffered a major outage way back in August 2007, when it went offline for two days. That outage was apparently triggered by a massive restart of users’ PCs across the globe as they re-booted to complete a Windows update.

Skype engineers later discovered a software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm that prevented the service from righting itself.