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Skype Outage Enters Day 2, Client Updated

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

August 17, 2007, 11:02 AM

Internet calling service Skype remained offline for most users Friday morning, as a major outage related to account sign-ins continued into its second day. Skype owner eBay's stock took a hit Thursday from the news, but Skype employees said the service was "on the road to recovery." Interestingly, Skype released a new version of its software Friday, despite the outage.

It's still not clear what exactly happened to cause the downtime, but more details will likely surface the problem is fully resolved. Skype did say that planned maintenance was not the cause, nor was an attack. "An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday," said Skype's Villu Arak.

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By ZenWarrior

posted Aug 20, 2007 - 10:37 AM

Have you heard their excuse?! Total BS if I've ever heard it! Read it and laugh:

http://technology.timeso..._web/article2292536.ece

Skype has *never* performed a self-update on any of my computers. This lame excuse was pulled out of someone's rear end.

Sounds like a denial of service attack to me--but they're saying it was caused by Skype itself. Someone please make sense of this.

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Aug 20, 2007 - 10:39 AM

Oops, my bad. They're actually blaming it on Microsoft. Still, total BS from Skype, IMHO.

Score: 0

By dhjdhj

posted Aug 18, 2007 - 6:54 PM

They claim it's fixed now and they also claim they'll tell everyone what happened on Monday (why wait, I wonder).

Should be interesting!

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Aug 19, 2007 - 1:44 PM

Yea, why wait until Monday unless you need a couple of days to place the proper spin on any explanation? Is the truth any different today than it will be tomorrow?

Or, are they just making certain they've remedied the problem(s) before releasing any public statements? That is reasonable.

Score: 0

By mersdad

posted Aug 17, 2007 - 5:50 PM

NSA

Score: 0

By yokozuna

edited Aug 18, 2007 - 3:08 AM

It is pretty possible according to mathaba.net:

Is it considerable coincidence, or a sign of modifications which would inevitably be difficult to execute without significant disruption?

Around 2 weeks ago the Bush administration pushed through Congress a law to bolster the government’s ability to intercept electronic communications without a court order.

The so-called Protect America Act, which passed both the House and Senate by wide margins just before Congress went on its August recess, allows the government to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who communicate with people overseas, and for the first time, allows the government to intercept communications between foreigners which are merely routed through the United States, as well as conversations of Americans traveling abroad.

The new law expanding the government's spying powers gives the Bush Administration a six-month window to install possibly permanent back doors in the nation's communication networks.

Prior to the law's passage, the nation's spy agencies, such as the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, didn't need any court approval to spy on foreigners so long as the wiretaps were outside the United States.
Now, those agencies are free to order services like Skype, cell phone companies and arguably even search engines to comply with secret spy orders to create back doors in domestic communication networks for the nation's spooks. Other nations like Australia have similar legislation in place already or on the books.

Skype presents a challenge to spooks, not so much because of its alleged encryption which could possibly be broken by backdoor access or weaknesses in a system that has not received much independent review and is updated almost daily, but because of its essential peer-to-peer (P2P) nature which makes monitoring of communications more difficult.

To enable compliance with the new U.S. laws, which also include that the service providers such as Skype are not allowed to report these activities and are to be immune from prosecution claims for example for violation of the U.S. constitutional or legal rights to privacy, it would be necessary to ensure that the Skype super-nodes are upgraded with software modifications to ensure more centralised routing and easier access to monitoring.

The fact that Skype has not had a serious outage in many years of operation until just two weeks after the passage of this new law could be mere coincidence, but otherwise could point to just such upgrades and modifications having been performed, and gone wrong. Messing with the Skype super nodes is no light matter, and the Skype P2P technology developed in Estonia was a closely guarded secret. U.S. company eBay, which owns also PayPal, faces allegations of compromise on security and privacy issues. It purchased Skype for some 5 billion dollars last year.

Most of the original Skype programmers have since left the company and changing the P2P algorithms to allow compromise could be a tricky and risky business whilst around 8 million users are online, and may have simply gone wrong. The choice of words by Skype in revealing its problems - software and "algorithms" - also lends credence to this theory: algorithms are typically used in automated encryption systems.

The original Skype protocol which had received an independent review and generally received the thumbs up for security implementation has long since been modified hundreds of times with automatic updates to most clients now being in force, thus there would be nothing to guarantee that those systems had not since been hopelessly compromised.

Skype's C.E.O. had promised an interview with Kurt Sauer for Mathaba News last year, but the interview never materialised. Several attempts were made to establish communication, but were ignored. When it was brought to his direct attention that a company with significant Israeli involvement was compromising the security of Skype users passwords, no response to the concerns was given and the company in question progressed to be an integral part of the Skype extras included for download.

Score: 0

By echohead

posted Aug 17, 2007 - 4:37 PM

i wonder if this was caused by the chinese group that reverse-engineered the skype protocol...

http://www.techcrunch.co...4/skype-protocol-hacked/

scroll down where it says the hack could destabilize the skype network. the group said they would release their hacked version of skype around the end of august. maybe theyre the cause?

Score: 0

By dhjdhj

posted Aug 17, 2007 - 4:12 PM

Remember all those people on this forum who were claiming how much better Skype was compared to other VoIP services such as Vonage?

I'm just saying.... (grin)

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Aug 17, 2007 - 4:22 PM

At least for me, it has been and remains better than any other I've tried or seen. Regardless, you still can't beat the value. Instead of paying at least $1000 for phone service this year, I'll pay somewhere around $250.

And, Skype makes it very clear that one should not fully depend on it. I do not by always having unanswered calls forward to my cell phone. So although there was a two day outage, I barely noticed it. And, anyone calling me never knew there was a problem.

Score: 0

By dhjdhj

posted Aug 17, 2007 - 4:39 PM

Huh? My unlimited Vonage account, covering most of Europe as well as the US costs about $25/month. Last time I looked, that was $300/year.

--->Instead of paying at least $1000

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Aug 19, 2007 - 1:39 PM

I was being extremely conservative with that dollar amount. You pay $25/month for Vonage (if they remain in business) and I actually pay less than $5.00/month for my Skype-In number and my outgoing phone calls. (Yes, that *five* dollars only. And, I can talk to the same people as anyone else.)

I was initially stating what my former POTS service cost per year. I think that is the fairest comparison since that's also the most dependable type of telephone service, historically speaking.

Score: 0

By Neoprimal

posted Aug 18, 2007 - 8:08 AM

There's also the fact that if your pc dies, or you turn it off, or you reboot...that you can still make phone calls.../shrug

I use Lingo (voip) and haven't looked back....been with em for 2 years + now.
But your pots is to voip, what voip is to skype/online-pc connected voip though...

If I lived in a place prone to power outages (blackouts, not necessarily brownouts) or natural disasters, I'd probably keep a pots line connected. Even with a kickass UPS, you're in deep sh^t if you're in a place like, for eg. Miami, where there's that chance that from June to Nov you could get hit by a bad cane' and power goes out for days.

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Aug 19, 2007 - 1:55 PM

One can easily afford enough UPS juice to keep a laptop and Skype running for a week! And, who doesn't have a cell phone these days?

Also, who now has only one computer? I keep Skype running on at least two different systems. If one is down, the other almost invariably is up and Skype-ing away.

POTS? Remember, it was not POTS which remained up in NYC during 9/11. It was Blackberry and cellular as I recall, although cellular was overwhelmed to some extent immediately following the attack. I may be mistaken so do feel free to correct me.

Score: 0

By yokozuna

posted Aug 17, 2007 - 11:29 AM

Skype - FUBAR?

Score: 0

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