Skype Out for 2 Days; Company Blames Mass PC Reboot
Skype’s service crashed last Thursday, leaving its customers without phone service for 2 days. The diruption has been attributed to the downloading of patches through Windows Update, which resulted in massive numbers of computers being restarted within a short timeframe. The number of offline computers allegedly caused a flood of log in requests and a lack of network resources to support services.
Further, Skype has said that it has detected a software bug within its network resource allocation algorithm that prevented the service’s self healing mechanism to withstand the computer restarts. The statement went on to say that service interruptions related to technology and communications services are common. In other words, reliability was a 90s thing.
Skype’s service is back up, but the outage is yet another blow to consumer confidence in VoIP, which has taken a beating recently with the Vonage patent issue and the downfall of Sunrocket. Cable may be the beneficiary of bad news, as the industry aggressively pushes bundled services, avoiding the term “VoIP” and its many synonyms.