On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user’s computers across the globe within a very short time frame as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update.
The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.
Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.
Read full story from Skype’s heartbeat blog >
Update: If you rely on Internet calls you might want to check out one of Skype’s competitors, VoipStunt, so you’ll have a backup solution in case this ever happens again…
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