CIO update: Post-mortem on the Skype outage:
As a follow-up to last week’s outage, here is a detailed explanation of what transpired, the root cause, and plans to mitigate this from happening again in the future. For starters, it helps to understand that Skype is based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which is explained here. Last week, the P2P network became unstable and suffered a critical failure. The failure lasted approximately 24 hours from December 22, 0800 PST/1600 GMT to December 23, 0800 PST/1600 GMT.
What was the cause for the failure?
On Wednesday, December 22, a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overloaded. As a result of this overload, some Skype clients received delayed responses from the overloaded servers. In a version of the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152), the delayed responses from the overloaded servers were not properly processed, causing Windows clients running the affected version to crash.
Users running either the latest Skype for Windows (version 5.0.0.156), older versions of Skype for Windows (4.0 versions), Skype for Mac, Skype for iPhone, Skype on your TV, and Skype Connect or Skype Manager for enterprises were not affected by this initial problem.
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