By Sharla Sikes

The summer of 2007 has been a tough one for independent VoIP providers. We’ve discussed the fall of SunRocket ad nauseum, but now Skype has joined the ranks of beleaguered VoIP services.

A software fault allegedly brought about the outage that the company is still working to fix.

“We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilising, but this process may continue throughout the day - we’re not out of the woods yet,” a statement on Skype’s website said.

Skype’s chief security officer, Kurt Sauer, told the New York Times that what happened was caused by “a unique set of events, the genesis of which is not entirely understood.”

The outage has been remedied, with users able to log on again at 3:53 a.m. GMT, but the company continues to work to repair its cause.

Apparently the software fault—which prevents users from signing on—has been present since 2003, but for unknown reasons did not cause a problem until now. Skype calls it a “deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software,” and asserts that its network was not hacked.

VoIP industry experts theorized that Skype’s network—based on peer-to-peer computing as well as “supernodes”—is inadequate for its size and the number of its users.

Call the outage growing pains or anything else you like, but Skype’s major outage will further tarnish VoIP’s image, especially that of independent providers.

“Lower-profile” technical issues apparently plagued Skype preceding the outage, according to analyst firm Ovum. The problems may be indicative of a company that developed its network without regard to resilience.

“Numerous people have remarked to me that ‘Skype is getting worse,’” said Ovum senior analyst Mark Main. “The difficulty analysing such problems is that all the evidence is anecdotal and certainly not based on a good statistical sample. Skype will need to work hard to make this outage event a one-off or its loyal user base could be enticed away by other, better VoIP offerings,” he warned. “There is plenty of choice.”

Related Content

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback