Skype suffers prolonged service outage

BANGALORE, INDIA: Skype, the peer-to-peer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service yesterday suffered a major outage resulting in widespread disruption.

The Skype status page quickly reported a software issue that meant that users were unable to login, with a possible time-to-fix of up to 24 hours.

Signs of a major problem became evident in the forenoon (Indian time) on Thursday although some users in London reported trouble even around midnight.

As a result many users were unable to connect to the network, meaning that services were effectively rendered unusable.

The service, at the time of filing this copy, is intermittent but unreliable.

According to Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum, outages and quality problems with VoIP service providers are "sadly still too common."

"That Skype has gone so long without a prolonged problem is quite an achievement," Main said. "However, this event is probably Skype's biggest hiccup to-date, as it approaches its fourth birthday. Rather more worrying is the admission by Skype that it is an algorithmic problem - Skype always claimed scalability due to it peer-to-peer mode of operation. A problem with the peer-to-peer algorithm also makes it more likely that very large numbers of users have been affected at some point, although Skype hasn't yet been specific about the scale of the outage."

Main stated that while looking a bit deeper, there have been a few signs in recent months that possibly all is not well with Skype.

"One of my colleagues was on a conference call the other day dialling in via SkypeOut and he was barely audible. Chat sessions I have initiated recently on Skype have taken upwards of five - sometimes fifteen - minutes to deliver small amounts of text to users whose status was shown as Online. The difficulty analysing such problems is that all the evidence is anecdotal and certainly not based on a good statistical sample. That the user base continues to grow - albeit now at a slower rate - suggests that the overall user experience has been good enough, so far."

There is still a danger that services designed to be highly disruptive to traditional telecoms business models have been developed without sufficient regard for resilience, something we have been saying since consumer VoIP came to the fore during 2003, Main continued.

Telecoms engineering is no different to any other product development - there is always a commercial penalty to pay by compromising reliability or quality. The voice networks switches of the past were certainly cumbersome, complex and costly, but the network was as close to rock-solid as you could expect to get.

"You still broadly get what you pay for in telecoms and there is a compromise users must accept in these relatively early days of VoIP-based voice services, especially the free on-net services," Main said.

"So the bottom line is that while Skype is now a well-established service it has largely flourished through its simplicity, good-enough quality/reliability and user-endorsement. However, there are no contracts to tie-in users and the approximately five million people that we estimate pay Skype for value-added services are those with a more compelling reason to stay. Skype will need to work hard to make this outage event a one-off or its loyal user base could be enticed away by other, better VoIP offerings. There is plenty of choice," he added.

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