"Perfect storm" sank Skype

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 22 August 2007 03:45

Business IT - Technology

Skype has provided more information about the cause of last week's outage.

What happened was that reboots associated with the Microsoft patches coincided with traffic patterns to reveal the fault previously discussed.

Describing the combination of circumstances as a "perfect storm", Skype's Villu Arak said "Skype’s peer-to-peer core was not properly tuned to cope with the load and core size changes that occurred on August 16... the [P2P network] self-healing needed outside intervention and assistance by our engineers"

Skype has traced and fixed the software fault that led to the outage.

"We’ve already introduced a number of improvements to our software to ensure our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring," added Arak.