Many users of the Skype messaging and VoIP service found themselves incommunicado today after the service went down for many users, with the outage in many cases causing the Skype software to crash.
The company has published a workaround that should allow crashing clients to get back online, and plans to have an easier solution "soon," but as yet has no explanation for the problems. Many users are continuing to complain of difficulties on Twitter, with occasional reports of problems even after taking the corrective action.
Most users appear to be unaffected, however, with around 26 million currently online.
Some wags are blaming the outages on Microsoft's recently announced purchase of the company, but that's simply not true; the deal is still pending regulatory approval, and for the moment, the companies remain separate.
The problem does, however, once again raise questions about the wisdom of Microsoft's acquisition. Skype's technology depends heavily on peer-to-peer connectivity. This allowed Skype to scale up to handle tens of millions of concurrent users without having to invest in substantial server capacity. However, this also makes the service vulnerable to problems that a more conventional client/server architecture—as used by Microsoft's own Messenger and Lync services—would be immune to. If large numbers of Skype clients go offline—whether due to mass reboots because of Windows Update or widespread crashes due to client bugs—the entire network can fail.
Today's problems don't seem to be as widespread as these past issues—though it's feasible that this might change if the company cannot produce a reliable fix in a timely manner—but the susceptibility to problems demonstrates one thing clearly; whatever Microsoft is buying from Skype, rock-solid reliable infrastructure isn't on the list.
Read the comments on this post
EMULEX EMS TECHNOLOGIES EMC ELECTRONICS FOR IMAGING ELECTRONIC DATA SYSTEMS
No comments:
Post a Comment