Skype Back Online

The VoiP was down for 2 days and a billion dollars.

We know a lot of our readers use Skype to call for free to families and friends around the world. So imagine everyone’s shock that for the past 3 days the service has been down keeping 220 million users without VoiP service. Reports have it that hackers attacked the Skype systems but they claim it was a “software bug” and everything has been back to normal since yesterday:

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.

Hmmm…
Since the success of Skype, just about every other service out there is now offering VoiP services – so if you use Yahoo, MSN or Gmail – you already have built in VoiP capabilities. This is a wake-up call to people who rely on Skype and also to Ebay who bought Skype for US$2.6 billion since the biggest news is that in the time that Skype was down Ebay’s market cap dropped by about US$1 billion – not really alot to worry about for the $45+ billion company, but you can see how devastating this was to not only the end users but to the business as well.