Skype crashes, eBay forced to eat its own dog food

ism tech

Posted Friday, 17 August 2007, 14:06 HST @920

Skype, the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service owned by eBay, was unavailable yesterday. Long-standing errors in Skype’s client software shut down the company’s supernodes, which took down the entire service. See this New York Times article for more background.

Convenience is all about timing

eWeek reported today that Skype is slowly coming back up, but millions of users are still unable to access the service.

Skype is releasing situation reports on its blog – here is the most recent post.

eBay had moved its North American office telephones from landlines to Skype, which didn’t help matters much yesterday. I discussed some of the business reasons behind this decision on December 13.

For eBay and many small companies that had based their telecommunications strategy in Skype, yesterday was a bitter lesson about redundant systems and failover. As two analysts noted in the eWeek article, Skype is not a landline replacement. The Financial Times pointed out today that disappointed Skype users may go back to less convenient, more reliable options.

Reliability is valuable

Systems will fail. Skype had four years to fix the problem that emerged yesterday. At Los Angeles International Airport last weekend, 20,000 passengers were stranded when a single network interface card (NIC) on a workstation caused a major LAX network to crash within 70 minutes. See SlashGear, CrunchGear and Consumerist for more details.

Bloggers including Mark Evans and Allen Stern discussed one interesting reswult of the outage – it really does appear that Skype matters.

Tags: airport, California, computer, eBay, hardware, Internet, network, Skype, software, telecom, VoIP

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2 responses so far ↓

1 Jim Humble // Monday, 20 August 2007, 10:30 HST @771

The worst item with the issue of Skype being down (that I have read about thus far) was their paying business clients received no better treatment than the individuals using Skype for free. Apparently, the downtime was due to a crash of their authentication servers (similar to the single point of failure mentioned above with the NIC in LAX crashing their network), which were used with both paid and non-paid clients. If I were a paying customer, I would be asking some hard questions of their customer service representatives at the moment (e.g. what am I paying for?). This seems to be part of a trend, high-profile businesses either doing business on the cheap, or hiring less than stellar tech support…
2 billso // Monday, 20 August 2007, 13:10 HST @882

I agree. Looks like Skype was not ready for this level of outage, so almost every customer got the cold shoulder.

See http://blogs.eweek.com/signaling_it/content001/voip/skypes_wheel_keeps_on_spinning.html for a discussion.