Millions of Skype users dumped after worldwide outage

by Steven Mostyn - Dec 23 2010, 04:38

If you’re a fan of VoIP communication, chances are you were forced to use ye olde telephone to speak with friends and family yesterday after Skype disappeared off the Net for a short while.

Apparently the fault of a ‘supernode’ network connection failure, millions of Skype users around the world found the service inaccessible or were abruptly dropped from calls at around 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday (PST), and were not able to reconnect for several hours.

“Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype—we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruptions to your conversations,” relayed Skype through its Twitter account. “Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal—thanks for your continued patience.”

According to an accompanying explanation posted to the Skype blog, internal suspicions were raised and an investigation was launched when user numbers quickly dipped in a manner that was deemed to be unusual.

“Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal,” added the Luxembourg-based company.

Although basic services were back up and running fairly quickly, Skype did stress that certain features—such as group video calling—would likely experience extended disruptions.

This week’s Skype outage is the second time the free telephony platform has collapsed in 2010. It is also thought to have affected significantly more users than a similar two-day failure that struck back in 2007.

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