Skype looks like it’s back this morning. At least, we’re logged in here in Ottawa, although I don’t see anyone else logged in that I know. The various explanations making the rounds this morning are interesting — everything ranging from a denial of service attack to the official Skype explanation (“it’s a bug”… how illuminating).
What conclusions can we draw from this?
- The much vaunted peer-to-peer architecture really isn’t that peer, nor that secure. Something has taken down the entire Skype network, and it seems to have been triggered by a software update to a login server controlled by Skype.
- Five nines uptime matters. Anyone who moved their landlines to Skype for business purposes got a nasty awakening yesterday. Five nines reliability is less than five minutes of downtime per year. What we all experienced yesterday was a little better than two nines — a twenty four hour outage.
- Building quality software is harder than it looks. The kids in Redmond take a lot of abuse for the quality of Windows, the number of patches they put out, and the lengthy periods of time between upgrades. Never have we seen every Windows PC stop operating globally for a twenty four hour period.
Over and out.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I would argue that in the world of PCs, 2-nines is the Windows-based platform and 5-nines would go to the OSX platform.
Here comes the flood – L8er – Martin
Bad comparison to Microsoft Windows. Windows is software, Skype is a service.
And Windows is full of bugs that crash it very frequently.
of course, joseph, all services are built from software and Skype markets itself as peer to peer software… not a service.