Good Morning Silicon Valley

With the image of Internet telephony already taking hits from the troubles of its market leaders (see “Vonage sends out leaky boat to pick up SunRocket crash survivors“), the sector really didn’t need another reason for people to think that VoIP still isn’t ready for prime time. That, however, is one of the rare messages to get through on Skype’s system today after an unspecified software issue knocked out service to millions of users around the world. The problem apparently began yesterday as users in Colombia, Brazil, Germany, Finland and the United States found they were unable to log on. Skype, owned by eBay, promised a fix in 12 to 24 hours and disabled new downloads.

One theory is that the crash had something to do with the latest batch of Microsoft patches pumped out yesterday for Windows XP and Vista, but that may just be “usual suspects” speculation. Om Malik is concerned the outage could raise questions about the vaunted reliability of peer-to-peer networks. “If a software upgrade from Microsoft (or for that matter any other OS vendor) can render Skype, one of the largest P2P services useless, then P2P economy is standing on shaky ground,” he says. But Ken Fisher at Ars Technica calls for cool heads. “What makes this Skype outage surprising is how often it doesn’t happen,” he writes. “This is the most significant outage for the service in years, yet we already foresee scores of headlines trumpeting the flaws of VOIP communications based on this outage alone. That’s unfortunate because we think Skype network performance has been spectacular on average, given that it’s free and heavily used. In fact, it would appear that the Skype P2P network is indeed in fine shape, it’s just that the authentication system (which authenticates but also provides location services for routing purposes) is hosed.”