Skype Outage Blamed on Supernodes

Skype Outage Blamed on Supernodes

Samir Makwana, Dec 23, 2010 1153 hrs IST

Undisclosed problems in different Skype versions brought down the peer-to-peer interconnecting system

About 12 hours ago, Voice calls offering service Skype went down and millions of users were affected. No one could make calls via Skype as a network connection failure error showed up. Skype's official blogger, Peter Parkes, apologized on behalf of the company on the Skype blog and stated that some of the computers- what they call supernodes- were taken offline due to a problem that affected some versions of Skype.

Skype is a popular voice call over Internet service that allows free calls to Skype users at cheaper International rates. On December 22, the service went down leaving several users stranded. The company reached out to its users via micro-blogging service Twitter with the update: Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal, thanks for your continued patience.

To fix the issue and make the services run in normal mode, Skype engineers are creating mega-supernodes to bring the services back to normal. Group Video calls would take longer to return back to normal.

Since the last two days, I personally have been facing issues performing video calls. When it was connected, the quality was below par than usual. We all hope Skype gets its mega-supernodes working soon.