Skype Crashes and Burns In Worldwide Outage

Stoobalou writes "VoIP and instant messaging service Skype has disappeared from the Internet, nary a fortnight after Microsoft snaffled up the outfit in a $8.5 billion deal."

Re:Hotmail all over again

[mewshi_nya]

Or, you know, it could just be a server issue. If you look, and ask Skype users, the outage is already over.

I know, not as fun as MS-bashing, but the best bashing is based on fact.

Don't think it's because of Microsoft

[courteaudotbiz]

Even though most Slashdotters will laugh about it, I don't think it is linked to the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft... The acquisition is so recent, I don't think anybody other than high ranked executives could have put their nose in Skype business, so I don't think Microsoft developpers could have caused such a mess.

Seriously...

[kvvbassboy]

I am really sick of this yellow journalism that's been popping up lately on Slashdot! Whoever is putting these articles on the front page, needs to do a better job.

It's supposed to be "News For Nerds", just report actual fucking facts related to science or tech, and not anti-MS bullshit or what color muffin Steve Jobs had for breakfast!

kdawson? Is that you?

[L4t3r4lu5]

1) Poorly researched, out of date information.
2) Inaccurate, inflammatory headline.
3) Short, information-free stub.

Sure seems like him.

Re:Say again?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let's rephrase TFS to something more like: "Some guy with a blog that hates Microsoft is experiencing issues reaching Skype servers and services and then submitted a link to Slashdot because Slashdot hates Microsoft. And Apple. And has issues with Linux. Y'know what, slashdot hates everything to do with computers."

Re:Is everybody really that stupid?

[phorm]

On the other hand, if I had just spent several billion to buy a company and their primary service went down hard, I'd probably be a little unhappy about it.

Microsoft bashing is pretty lame though. It's like the idiots that blame [political party X] for every small problem in the world.

Re:Say again?

[Dunega]

That would prevent the needed Microsoft bashing that is seemingly required on Slashdot.

Re:Whoops

[petermgreen]

If we both have a presence on the internet, there's no reason to involve a third party for us to communicate.

If you have medium term stable IPs and your own domain (though you could argue that relying on DNS is relying on a third party) then I would agree with you.

Most client machines don't have that. Many are behind NATs and even those that aren't may not have stable IPs. P2P should be used for the actual call data where possible but servers are needed to keep track of users locations and (if you want to provide a reliable service to those behind NAT*) to provide a fallback path for call data in the event that P2P transmission is not acheivable.

What we should really be doing is a system similar to email. With email you can either rely on a third party or host it yourself if you have an appropriate connection and there is no reason the same can't be done for VOIP.

* SIP doesn't really get on very well with NAT and worse the provider I used liked to pin the blame on NAT for half-calls despite the fact they had worked fine in the past with the same NAT.

Is Skype _really_ peer to peer?

[Sloppy]

The evidence for it being p2p is:

1. They say it is
2. It uses somebody else's "background processing"

The evidence against it being p2p is:

1. Users just happen to have simultaneous outages.
2. Skype user interface doesn't have any place where you enter/verify the key fingerprints of the person you're talking to. The other identity seems to have always been magically introduced to you, apparently by the one single universe-wide trusted authority, and coincidentally..
3. ..Skype has made deals with certain governments to allow them to monitor their citizens' phone calls.

(All being things which don't happen in a p2p system, unless at least some vital part of it isn't p2p.)

Look at the evidence and decide. I'd say look at the source, but Skype doesn't give you that. That's right folks, they don't allow security auditing for -- no, not a game .. no, not a 3d driver -- a communications tool. I am struggling to think of a class of applications (which aren't specialized for certain industries, like nuclear, medical, aviation, etc -- I mean stuff used by "regular people") where that's more necessary.

Re:Like father like son

[Locutus]

some of us have been around the block for too many years to not have fun with this. Microsoft may have finally got a version of their OS uptimes high enough to not require redundant servers(hardware) with failover but it's taken them decades to finally do it. Not to mention the huge increase in man hours it's taken to support Windows systems. They are a joke because they earned it.

Many of us lived through the hardships of a conversion from UNIX to Windows and it has not been pretty. I'm reminded of how Microsoft themselves has quite the difficulty converting Hotmail from UNIX to Windows. It's been said it took about 2x the hardware to finally get Hotmail running on Windows instead of UNIX. You don't shake that off unless you're either a newbie, a fanboi, or both.

LoB

Re:Is everybody really that stupid?

[Lunix Nutcase]

then who made the decision regarding asterisk? Hint: Microsoft.

Wrong. Skype made that decision months ago, but that was conveniently left out of that other article.

It doesn't take months or years for them to make heavy-handed management decisions that impact the company negatively.

Sure, if you ignore the fact that Microsoft doesn't even own Skype yet since it hasn't even gotten FTC approval.

Re:Is everybody really that stupid?

[Lawrence_Bird]

From the original presser:

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties hope to obtain all required regulatory clearances during the course of this calendar year.

So yes, people really are that stupid (or hateful of Microsoft).