Skype Explains the Reason Behind Its Massive Outage

Skype, the most popular VoIP service out there, experienced quite some big hiccups yesterday and it seems like the problems are still ongoing for some users. As the company explained, a problem in the Skype client software left some users unable to log in or connect. While Skype has been working on fixing it, it is a time-consuming process and the problem has not been resolved completely at this point.

"We noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn’t typical or expected, so we began to investigate," Skype wrote on its blog.

"Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call 'supernodes' – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype," it explained.

"Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype," it added.

This issue was apparently so widespread that it affected quite a big percentage of Skype's regular user base. Unfortunately for Skype, the only way to fix the problem, in a timely fashion, was to manually create these supernodes again.

"Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal," Skype explained.

This process was supposed to take a few hours. However, at this time some users are still experiencing problems, as Skype has revealed on its Twitter account. Skype also warned that some features, like group video chat may take longer to be restored.

While it hasn't been an outright outage, the problems affected millions of people. Yet, while there are plenty of Skype alternatives, the service is too popular to have any long-term problems because of this.