Skype’s back now.

The major outage experienced by millions of Skype users a few days back was a results of Skype’s load balancing  algorithm not being able to coupe with a sudden surge of login requests.
Why the sudden surge in login request? Microsoft had released a patch through windows update and most of the Windows boxes out set to auto update decided to reboot at the same time. Imagine.

Skype has since fixed their algorithm and are quite confident that this glitch will not repeat itself. I can’t really blame them for this, Skype’s always been good to me. I am quite sure that their infrastructure was setup to hale sudden spike but just not as high as what was experienced this time.

At least we can be happy that the outage was not caused by a security glitch or anything else in that manner. Skype’s been good to me all this time and I’m glad to see them back up and running.

Source : What happened on August 16 - Heartbeat

Skype service has been fully restored after 2 days of outage due to problems with the login system.

The people at Skype will be providing an announcement on what actually caused the outage on their blog, Heartbeat, this Monday 20th August 2007.

Everything is back to normal now. All my Skype calls are going through fine but quality as usual just OK due to the excellent bandwidth provided by our brilliant ISP here in Malaysia.

I’ve been on my land line for the past 2 days, I don’t even want to imagine what my bill is going to look like. Thank god Skype is back.

Back to productive telephony for me

Thanks Skype for promptly rectifying the issue.

I’ve been having trouble with skype for the past few hours. I can log in to skype, make a call but when I key in my meeting number it does not go through. I keep getting errors saying “no key was entered”. The DMTF tones are not going through. Sigh… I had to go back to my land line with no headphones or speaker phone capabilities.

Apparently Skype is experience some major issues within it’s network which is going to take them 12-24 hours to rectify. Skype has posted a notice regarding the outage. See notice here.

Are you having issues with Skype today?

Sources;

Skype

ars technica

Free calls to the United States and Canada ended 31st December 2006 as stated by Skype. Skype to Skype calls and chats will still remain free as usual.
If you use Skype regularly to make calls like me then you might consider getting the yearly plan for USD15, that’s about RM50 here in Malaysia. You will be entitled to make unlimited calls to the United States and Canada for the whole year. The 15USD price is only valid till 31st Jan 2007, after that the price will double to USD30/year. Grab it quick I say!!

Get the latest Skype software here. Skype 3.0

Skype Homepage