Skype Blames Software for Problems

As you probably know, about a week ago Skype was down for millions of users. Well, in a blog post today, Skype tells us what happened. Basically what happened was a large (25-30%) cluster of their super-nodes got overloaded, and the version of Skype that most people had (version 5.0.0152) handled it incorrectly. What made the problem worse was at the time the nodes crashed, people restarted their clients. This added to the traffic going to the other nodes. The blog post says the total traffic was about 100 times what was normal. Skype had already released a version (version 5.0.0.156) that would fix the problem, but at the time most people hadn’t upgraded. Older versions of Skype such as version 4.0 worked fine, and it was only the 5.0.0152 version that was affected. They fixed it by introducing “mega-nodes” into the P2P network to relieve the stress, allowing everything to go back to normal. Check out the entire blog post here.