Skype is down, millions are speechless

Skype, the internet telephony service and instant-messaging application, has been non-operational, globally, for the past 24 hours.

It’s a massive outage: effectively crippling an entire company which was worth US$2.6 billion when eBay purchased it back in 2005. It also leaves the 8 million very regular users (though most newspapers are running with the “220 million users” figure) somewhat speechless, unable to access either the free IM, or the paid calling service.

Since many people across the globe, including a good number of expats such as myself, rely on Skype as an international phone service, a lot of people – and a lot of businesses – have been left stranded, unable to make calls or access their contact lists.

When I attempt to sign in, I get the message, “Failed to sign in: unable to connect to Skype P2P network”, as shown in the dialogue box below (click to enlarge):

The P2P bit means “peer to peer”, meaning that the Skype system is not a centralised network, such as MSN messenger’s, but actually a more spidery web of individual computers attached to regional supernodes. But, according to the Skype corporate blog which is posting occasional – though vague – updates on the situation, a dodgy algorithm within the Skype software had suddenly come to the fore and crippled the supernodes and servers. Ouch. So that’s how an entire company worth nearly 3 billion US can grind to a total halt.

Within China, Skype has 25 million registered users. Though the amount of those who are very regular users probably shrinks to as little as a few million, in reality.

The latest update on the Skype blog was posted at 11:00am GMT (that’s 7pm Beijing time), but that is actually a full 5 hours ago from the time of my writing this, showing that the updates are surprisingly sparse, and that the enormity of the problem might well take a further 24 hours – or more – to completely resolve.

And, the mood in the comments section is beginning to show frustration at Skype – with words such as “smokescreen” being used to describe the blog’s updates – as a huge number of paying customers head into a 2nd full day of being unable to access the service.

Since Skype is actually cheaper for calling home than using any of the lousy ‘IP cards’ from China Telecom or China Unicom, and offers better sound quality too, there’s no real alternative for calling an international land-line at the moment. Luckily, it’s not my Mum’s birthday until next month, because I’d be in big trouble if it was today or tomorrow.