Skype: interconnection outage of the P2P system

Suffering from a global outage, the Skype’s Internet telephony service was unavailable for hours on Wednesday. The service should be progressively restored.

On Wednesday the Skype VoIP service encountered some large technical problems, with the service inaccessible for numerous hours. This outage was on a global scale. As is often the case, Twitter served as the "complaints office". Some users let out their frustrations on the micro blogging service, stating that their calls were dropped in the middle of a conversation. In somewhat of an ironic twist, the micro blogging service also encountered a short outage during this period.

In the evening of Wednesday, Skype announced a progressive return to normal service. Users were continually encountering connection problems, with Skype explaining on their blog that their network calls on supernodes which act as a telephone directory allowing you to find users online. On Wednesday, too many of these supernodes were offline following a problem which affected "certain versions of Skype".

Skype’s Peer-to-Peer interconnection system was therefore inaccessible. To quickly correct the issue, new "mega-supernodes" were created. Certain functions like group video calls took a little longer for the service to be restored.

With Skype preparing an Initial Public Offering on the stock market in 2011 (for close to 1 billion dollars), this rare incident arrived at an inconvenient moment, diminishing the service’s image. In their status update, Skype did point out that their enterprise services Skype Connect and Skype Manager continued to function normally.

Skype claims that 124 million users are connected on average each month. In November, a record 25 million users were simultaneously connected at the same time.