Skype restored, but executives still in hiding

Disclaimer: I’m a big fan of Skype – it’s my IM client of choice.

The Skype PR disaster continues unabated. There is no end in sight.

The Skype network service has been restored. Here is a short explanation of their problem:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

This and other postings were made by someone named Villu Arak, about which practically nothing can be found.

Skype had one of the most significant outages of any online service, and none of its executives have so much as said “Hello”.

Skype’s network disaster has been solved, but Skype’s PR disaster continues. Have they ever heard the terms “goodwill”, “media relations”, or “customer service”?

Earlier story.