Skype went down suddenly Wednesday — and still hasn’t come back online for millions of users around the world. As of Thursday morning, about five million people are back online.
Peter Parkes, Skype’s blogger-in-chief, said the ability of one Skype user to find another relies on what the company calls “supernodes.” On Wednesday, he explained, a number of those supernodes failed due to a software issue. Skype has identified the issue and engineers are working to resolve the problem.
“Millions of you are already reporting that you can now sign in to Skype normally, and we estimate that there are already almost five million people online,” Parkes said. “As a guide, this is around 30 percent of what we’d expect at this time of day — and that number is increasing all the time. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to predict on an individual level when you’ll be able to sign in again, and we thank you for your patience in the meantime.”
Skype Credits?
Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis, said it’s interesting to watch the reaction — not so much of Skype but of Skype’s consumer and business users — to the outage. As he sees it, more moderate expectations of availability driven by the consumerization of IT, coupled with the seemingly impervious nature of the Internet itself, have created a strange brew where customers anticipate outages like this yet still feel outraged when they occur.
“Certainly Skype is no longer a tiny, private startup playing the role of market disruptor,” Shimmin said. “If anything, the angry shouting that has followed on the heels of this outage point to the fact that Skype is now an enterprise player, and as such it must adhere to a higher standard of performance and, if not performance, then responsibility.”
Shimmin pointed to vendors like…