Skype, the peer-to-peer VoIP service yesterday suffered a major outage resulting in widespread disruption to its users. The Skype status page quickly reported a software issue that meant that users were unable to login, with a possible time-to-fix of up to 24 hours. Signs of a major problem became evident around the middle of the day (London time) on 16 August although some users reported trouble even earlier in the morning. As a result many users were unable to connect to the network, meaning that services were effectively rendered unusable. At the time of writing (start of the UK business day on 17 August), service is now intermittent but unreliable.

   Outages and quality problems with VoIP service providers are sadly still too common - most service providers have glitches that can last from a few minutes to a few hours. That Skype has gone so long without a prolonged problem is quite an achievement. However, this event is probably Skype’s biggest hiccup to-date, as it approaches its fourth birthday. Rather more worrying is the admission by Skype that it is an algorithmic problem – Skype always claimed scalability due to it peer-to-peer mode of operation. A problem with the peer-to-peer algorithm also makes it more likely that very large numbers of users have been affected at some point, although Skype hasn’t yet been specific about the scale of the outage.

    Looking a bit deeper, there have been a few signs in recent months that possibly all is not well with Skype. Numerous people have remarked to me that ‘Skype is getting worse’ and, as an occasional user, I would tend to agree. One of my colleagues was on a conference call the other day dialling in via SkypeOut and he was barely audible. Chat sessions I have initiated recently on Skype have taken upwards of five - sometimes fifteen - minutes to deliver small amounts of text to users whose status was shown as Online. The difficulty analysing such problems is that all the evidence is anecdotal and certainly not based on a good statistical sample. That the user base continues to grow - albeit now at a slower rate - suggests that the overall user experience has been good enough, so far.