Skype - Outages and Downtime

Outages and Downtime

On 16 August 2007, Skype became unavailable for two days to a majority of its users. Millions of users were requesting to log-in at the same time following a routine Windows Update and this flooded the peer-to-peer system.

On 22 December 2010, it was reported that Skype experienced an outage estimated to represent 8 million foregone calls. Skype administrators placed the following message on their Twitter page: "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype -- we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations...engineers and site operations are working non-stop to get things back to normal." The problem came down to the limited availability of "supernodes", affecting some versions of Skype. Later in the day, Skype's CEO, Tony Bates, issued an apology. He said that the matter was being taken very seriously and was being thoroughly investigated. He said that malicious attack was not being ruled out as a problem cause and he put his estimate of the foregone calls at about 10 million. On 23 December 2010, Skype's blog with Tony Bates issued another apology through a video posted on YouTube for the Skype outage.

The problem persisted across the North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. It had started to subside by 8:30 pm UTC; however users were warned it might take several hours for the program to be fully operative again. It was reported at 9:27 am 23 December UTC that most users were able to log in again although some still could not. On the other hand into Thursday only about a third of the expected traffic was actually using Skype, relative to the time-period. On 23 December 2010, Skype said on its blog that the system had stabilized, and a detailed explanation of the incident was published six days later. Bates offered all Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay customers a free call to any landline as compensation. Subscribers had their subscription extended by one week.