DHT Behind Skype Crash?

Not that anybody really claims to know, but there's some thinking that the Skype outage was caused by some failure of the Distributed Hash Tables that Skype Supernodes apparently maintain. Some say "this is normally very slow and done over UDP," so restoration, even once the problem is identified, will take some time. So even as the ability to send instant messages and set up voice sessions is restored, other niceties, such as correct "presence" information, might take a little longer. The immediate problem, some say, is that if a Skype client cannot find a Supernode (and I am not a techie, but understand a DHT corruption would have something very serious to do with that sort of failure mode, then even if a client is authenticated by a central server, the user would not be able to get onto the Skype network.

All I know is that this failure mode would explain why I can communicate using text, and send audio, but my presence shows as "offline," when I am "online." I will test a live conversation tomorrow morning and see what happens.

This is a crisis management professional's dream: when your client is getting lots of bad press, some other bigger event occurs to overshadow it. So Skype now is sucking all the oxygen out of the "I'm mad my VoIP doesn't work" room.

Skype Sorta, Kinda Up

Though my status shows "offline" to Rich Tehrani, my Skype client seems to be up, though sending incorrect status information. Not many contacts seem to be visible at the moment.

Skype Outage Not Over

Skype initially said its outage is over, but that clearly is not the case everywhere, and we are nearing 24 hours since the log-in problem began. Now Skype warns that the outage is likely to continue through Friday. My U.S. log-in still hangs.

The service had been sporadic but gradually improving during the business day in Asia on Friday, some report.

"There are about 2.5 million people logged in right now, where normally there would be over 8 million, and it's been going on and off every 10 minutes," says Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum in London.

You may draw your own conclusions about which other application or service providers might benefit, but urges to gloat should generally be suppressed. Nobody whose service uses IP and the public networks is safe from outages or service disruptions.

That's why businesses and networks have redundancy. People who scream and yell about losing their service have only themselves to blame if they didn't build some level of diversity and redundancy even into their personal communications. Use Skype, other IM applications, mobiles, POTS-replacement VoIP, and POTS, email and anything else you can get your hands on. Some of us use multiple mobiles from different providers and multiple broadband providers. But never hang everything on any one service or provider, especially if your business depends on it. Personally, I wouldn't even hang my personal communications on a "single provider" strategy.

Voice Quality is Getting Worse: What Would You Expect?

Those of use who grew up with one phone company got spoiled by the reliability and quality of its communications network (despite "customer service" so bad it became an oxymoron)," says technology journalist Mark Stephens, whose pen name is Robert X. Cringely. "Those of us trying to save a few bucks by piggy-backing voice services on the Internet are starting to get what we've paid for."

Skype itself now is experiencing an outage that might take 12 to 24 hours to fix (Aug. 16).

There's a larger trend at work here, and it happens in virtually all formerly highly-regulated businesses when deregulation and new technology hit. Remember when airlines were highly regulated, and could not compete on the basis of price? How did they compete? Amenities and other non-price differentiators. Of course, prices were high and not that many people flew.

Deregulation hits and all of a sudden price becomes a key competitive weapon. Of course, when people start paying lots less, something has to give. Like amenities. But more people fly now.

So here's the problem communications service provider executives face: they can't afford to run "gold plated networks" for the same reason airlines cannot. Obsessive concern about voice quality and service availability are one thing in a highly regulated environment. Such concern is quite something else in a highly competitive marketplace where customers in fact choose to pay money for service that is quite a bit less intensive than it once was.

In a nutshell, the business problem is that operators cannot afford to maintain the same obsessive levels of quality when customers demonstrably don't care. Mobile communications is the best example. Everybody uses mobile service. And everybody knows it simply is not as reliable as wired phone service. Nor is the audio quality as good. But it's a wild success, anyway.

If people will not pay you to maintain a higher quality of service, can you afford to do it? That's the problem the global communications business faces. People are voting with their pocketbooks: buying services with lesser quality on some metrics because the overal utility of mobility is so high.

In other cases, such as over the top VoIP, they are voting with their wallets to buy cheaper services with less reliable service.

Get used to it. In virtually every deregulated, formerly monopolistic industry, overall quality will drop. Of course, there's another trend as well. New, higher cost alternatives will develop. Because some people need high quality enough to pay for it.

IP communications are very valuable. They are very useful. But they are not as robust as the old public switched network, if only because of things like latency. The services can be made more rugged, of course. It just costs money.