2007-08-16

Skype Outage and downloads

Some people are speculating that the general outage is due to the Windows patches that were released yesterday. They could be right, but i don't think so! On one of my computers, i didn't install the patches, and Skype didn't work.

I guess something worse is happening, like a very heavy attack on the Skype servers. But i could be wrong. Why do i think so? Look at the extract of the graph copied from http://nyanyan.to/

  1. The first green upward arrow point from the sudden increase in the speed of downloads, to the sudden decrease of users online.
  2. The second green downward arrow points to the only few minutes (20?) during which indeed the downloads were almost stopped (by Skype - this seems to confirm their message)!
  3. The two other green lines are there only to emphasis the changed slope of the download curve (a higher slope meaning more downloads).

I tried to download the Skype client, and i succeeded!

This combination of higher downloads and Skype outage is very weird: this looks like a hacker or a download-BOT is infecting the main Skype servers!

5 comments:

ONLYEBAY said...

Hi Jean, the higher downloads during the Skype blackout is not necessarily inconsistent. There will always be a percentage of users that seeing tht Skype is not working, try to re-download and re-install the program. Especially if they are running older releases and think a new release might fix the problem.

That said, the new slope looks suspiciously constant.

What I don't understand is why they can't stop downloads. It's as easy as removing the link from the Skype web page.

Very strange indeed!

Jean Mercier said...

You could be right that it isn't inconsistent, i didn't think about that!

ONLYEBAY said...

Jean, do you think we may see a permanent drop in users online when this whole blackout is fixed. A small percentage of users may have switched to an alternate Voip provider or just decided to uninstall and go back to fixed line. I mean, how loyal is the average Skype user?

Jean Mercier said...

I don't thin many users will switch. What will indeed happen, is that some users, who use it very seldom, will not come back.

And they lost one day of potential growth

Anonymous said...

Or two (or more) days of growth...