
Great. Skype is down. - b-boy-b
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/12/22/great-skype-is-down/
======
jnovek
Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable
internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than
that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially
considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

~~~
ams6110
My landline at home has never* had an outage in 27 years.

* that I'm aware of

~~~
bobbyi
Landlines are from a different era of expected reliability. They carry their
own power because it was considered too unreliable to depend on your home's
electricity.

~~~
aw3c2
And that is a very healthy precaution. I really do not want to lose that
security.

~~~
riffraff
but it's not so necessary anymore. If my home line is down (which can happen
since it's over ip), with a simple power outage, I can still call with my
mobile. If my mobile is out of battery I can call with my girlfriend's mobile.
Then the neighbours.

We have highly redundant communication systems compared to when landlines were
the only option and SPOF in the building.

~~~
piramida
If your home line is down and nearby cell stations are not operational, then
what? Pigeons? :)

~~~
riffraff
It depends: what is the occasion in which the power grid goes down (or your IP
carrier is down) and multiple mobile operators are down? Let's say: flooding,
earthquake, riots, evil government shutting down telcos.

Then there is a high chance that also my land line would be down.

Thinking of it, I must get some homing pigeons _now_ ;)

------
Jayasimhan
may be we need this :) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

~~~
trucious
Somehow I knew it would be this before clicking

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AgentConundrum
I didn't know what the hell was going on. I got a message a couple hours ago
saying that Skype had crashed. Not that it couldn't connect or anything, but a
"Unhandled Exception blew the sucker up. Feel free to totally fail to load
this in Visual Studio" message.

I didn't try to restart it, since I very rarely use it anyway, but I did find
it quite odd since I've never seen that happen to Skype.

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technomancy
I've been really enjoying using Mumble for voip pair programming today during
the Skype downtime. It's really easy to set up a server, and it has a lot more
flexibility as far as mic sensitivity. I find the latter to be very useful
when working in a noisy coffee shop or outside during the summer.

<http://mumble.sourceforge.net/>

~~~
nitrogen
Mumble, while designed as a game chat system, is excellent for any kind of
audio conferencing. It can be configured with very low latency (lower, in
fact, than shouting down the hall) and CD quality audio.

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robfitz
I'm okay with this. Their last downtime was 3 years ago.

I still get robotic 'network busy' announcements from my mobile phone network,
and I pay an awful lot more for that (under an infinitely more draconian
contract) than I do for Skype.

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GBKS
I just needed to have a call with two people. For some reason, I could talk on
Skype with one of them. The other one I called in via Gmail Voice Chat, so
everybody could hear each other. Worked out great.

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noarchy
Skype is so rarely down that this did take me by surprise. Obviously they've
been doing something right. Every other service that I use, even electricity,
has been down more often. Heck, my favourite games are down every week, even
every day.

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michaelchisari
Although generally Skype is very reliable, I think this does make a case for
open, distributed systems, at least when it comes to something that many, many
people and organizations are reliant on.

~~~
jedsmith
People make this argument every time something quietly critical fails or
doesn't work the way they want it to. As a recent example, look at the
completely false FUD about ICANN "seizing domains"; there were nearly instant
calls for an "open, decentralized" DNS.

It's almost as if these proposed solutions wait for the slightest problem to
occur, then everybody rushes to pitch a Tor utopia.

I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many
reasons. Peer-to-peer anything comes with its own truckload of problems, and
would do more harm here than good (as with the DNS).

~~~
mike-cardwell
We already have a distributed voip platform. "distributed" in the same way as
email is at least. Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in
the DNS. I'm not sure what Tor has to do with anything.

And as michaelchisari said, we already have distributed IM via the magic of
XMPP federation.

~~~
viraptor
Sorry you missed some steps there:

\- Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS.

\- Discover that you also need A records (that now collides with webserver on
your domain), because not every client supports SRV. (and some also need
NAPTR)

\- Discover that half of the phones are not compatible with your server out of
the box.

\- Discover that to support vendor A you need to enable X and to support
vendor B you need to disable X.

\- Discover that you cannot call users on network xyz.com because you're not
authorized to.

XMPP, email, etc. are nice and well defined (yes, even email with all its
problems) compared to SIP. SIP works ok-ish within one limited domain and one
set of (clients-servers). It does not work between unrelated people.
Additionally big internet telephony "supporters" like Cisco will do a lot to
make sure your phone works correctly only with their gateway and almost
nothing else (voip non-supporters like MS will do the same).

~~~
mike-cardwell
Yeah. I also didn't supply server setup instructions and service configuration
examples. Sorry.

We _do_ have a distributed voip network. But yes, it does need work to improve
it. Skypes simplicity is what makes it so popular.

~~~
viraptor
What I was trying to say is that currently - no, we do not have any sane
working solution. It's not about setting up and configuration. It simply
doesn't work as advertised. It's not distributed (unfortunately) and half of
the industry works very hard to prevent it from being distributed (although I
wouldn't attribute it to malice).

XMPP/jingle is in a much better position to be the distributed answer. SIP is
not.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Ok, I was simply addressing this nonsensical comment:

"I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many
reasons. Peer-to-peer anything comes with its own truckload of problems, and
would do more harm here than good (as with the DNS)."

Thank you for mentioning Jingle. I was not aware of its existence.

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mMark
At less than half of what I would be charged for my regular landline for calls
to China, the UK, and NA I think it's fair to give them some slack and let
them have a few hours to repair things.

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ABrandt
Can anyone suggest a quick alternative to skype conference calling? Today is
the one day I actually had an important use for this and it goes down...

A phone line could work, but is not ideal due to distance. Thanks.

UPDATE: Skype just signed me in. Anyone else have this happen? UPDATE2: Back
down again after only a few minutes. Hopefully they're close to a fix.

------
j79
We switched over to Skype as our primary tool for inter-office
communication(s) a few years ago. It's been a fun day.

I've actually resorted to sending out e-mails (like it was 2001, hah!)

The lack of distractions is quite nice, though. =) It's amazing how productive
everyone seems to be (when we're not complaining about skype being down...)

------
yock
The Android app is getting loads of negative reviews today from people who
think the app doesn't work.

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ankimal
A tweet doing the rounds is "Julian Assange is trying to make a private phone
call so they took down Skype."

I dont pay for skype so I cant really complain if its down. But what about
those who pay? I would be really pissed if I had a ton of skype credit and
couldn't call.

------
peterwwillis
Haven't searched much yet - does this have anything to do with the Skype
protocol encryption being cracked and the people responsible leaking POC code
before they release it to the world this month at 27C3?

~~~
mfukar
It was already released back in August. I don't understand why you're getting
downvoted, though; it must have been a very valid concern before Skype made
any announcements.

~~~
peterwwillis
Heh, well it's going to be a concern again after this month. IIRC they said
they are going to release a more complete tool to let you explore the Skype
network in general (besides just decoding packets for sniffing). In theory you
can penetrate corporate networks wherever there is a Skype client running, and
if they found a bug in an old version of Skype it's possible they could send a
worm through the network and take out a lot of machines.

But maybe it is more likely that it was just an innocent bug. I just asked the
question because it seemed like a big coincidence that Skype should go down
right before these guys do a big exposee on the protocol and encryption.

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muppetman
I just woke up (I'm in New Zealand), read all the "Skype is down" stories and
logged into Skype without issue.

Either I'm really lucky, or it's recovering.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. After being online for 15 minutes, it's gone offline
again.

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lallysingh
Yup, I was about to have a call with my advisor (across the atlantic), and
neither of us could log in. I tried on an android phone and a linux box.

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pclark
I actually rebooted my router, assuming that was why I couldn't connect to
Skype. Don't think it's ever been offline before for me.

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goombastic
Upgrade to algorithm in progress... probably. Or some government getting a
tap.

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dholowiski
Leo Laporte is going to be pissed.

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dennisgorelik
It's taking Skype too long to fix the outage.

