Disruptive Telephony

Since voipstutter thinks I should rename this blog “Skype Telephony”, I may as well feed into that image by noting that, per the Skype blog, Skype is now 4 years old.  I was not a user then, but judging by the screenshots of the client in 2003, it certainly has come a long way.  Whatever your opinions of Skype, it certainly has caused disruptions in the world of telcom… and it definitely does keep things interesting.  Congrats to the folks at Skype for hitting that birthday.

I noticed late last night that this weblog was added to the “Friends of Skype” blog roll that appears on the side of Skype’s blogs.  Thanks, Skype, for adding me… I certainly don’t mind the potential for others to find me. I do write about Skype, although often some of that writing can be critical.

I’ll note, too, that Skype’s list is actually a great compilation of the various bloggers out there who write about VoIP and collaboration.  Many of them would think of themselves as  (and accept the label of) “VoIP bloggers”, but others are from the larger blogging space (ex. Neville Hobson, Robert Scoble, Ross Mayfield).

At VoiceCon this week, one of the smaller booths that looked quite interested was that of OnState, a company launching a Live Chat capability for their call center solution based on Skype.  With my schedule at the show, I was unable to spend much time going through a demo, but what I did see looked quite interesting and I thought I might blog about it at some point.

However, it turns out that Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal has written a rather comprehensive post about OnState, with all sorts of links to prior articles, resources, etc.  Now, Jim wrote his story primarily to address issues he found in two other stories about OnState, but the result is a nice profile of what the offering is all about.

I would have to wonder, though, what kind of reaction OnState was getting at VoiceCon given how recently the massive Skype outage was.  Anyway, I would recommend checking out Jim’s article and the various links off of it.

In answer to the many questions raised after their announcement yesterday, Skype today issued a clarification FAQ: “The Microsoft connection clarified“.  For starters, they clearly stated that there was no connection to Microsoft:

1. Are we blaming Microsoft for what happened?

We don’t blame anyone but ourselves. The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst — a trigger — for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it. And Microsoft has been very helpful and supportive throughout.

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

(more in the FAQ)

In response to the question that many of us raised (for instance, in my post yesterday) about “why this month’s update?”, Skype wrote:

2. What was different about this set of Microsoft update patches?

In short – there was nothing different about this set of Microsoft patches. During a joint call soon after problems were detected, Skype and Microsoft engineers went through the list of patches that had been pushed out.…

Well, the official word is out from Skype and it can be summarized: the reboots from Microsoft patches triggered a previously-undetected condition and crashed out network. 

Skype PR staffer Villu Arak writes in “What happened on August 16“:

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.

Okay… I can buy that this type of thing could trigger some kind of chain reaction, but I don’t understand why this month was different than any other month.  For.. what? two or three years now (more?) Microsoft patches have been coming out like clockwork on the second Tuesday of each month.  Each second Tuesday or Wednesday, the millions of computers set to auto-update do so.  All those zillions of computers restart automatically.  Each and every month.  What was so…