Why Skype went down for 24 hours

A week after the biggest Skype outage in recent memory (it lasted around 24 hours,) the company CIO posted an interesting rundown of how and why the failure occurred, giving a glimpse as to how Skype works behind the scenes. On Wednesday, December 22, a Skype server handling offline messaging became overloaded, resulting in delayed messages. Due to a bug, a version of Skype for Windows did not process those delayed messages correctly, which made them crash. This led to around 25% of the total Skype supernodes, the clients directing connections and logins in the Skype network, to crash. Since Skype clients have protections built in so that they do not overload the systems they run on, the large amount of crashed clients being restarted caused a massive load on the network, causing more supernodes to shut down to protect themselves. Almost the whole Skype network was thus brought to a halt. Check out the post to view more details, and how the Skype team brought everything back online.

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