With an estimated number of 20 million users, Skype is the biggest free Internet phone company from the online environment. However on 22 December at around 20:30GMT hours Skype suffered some major problems thus affecting million of users from all over the world, whether we are talking about Europe, USA or Asia.
The problem seems to have appeared due to a “supernode” outage and still persists today in many locations of the Globe. A Skype representative said that this outage was ongoing and over 20 million calls were lost since the problem occurred. Technically speaking, Skype has available not just one supernode but a large number of them, however most of them were taken offline by an issue that affected some versions of Skype application. While this service is usually at its highest standards, on 22 December it was down and not accessible from any part of the globe.
According to company’s spokespersons, Skype engineers are trying to create some mega-supernodes to solve this problem as fast as possible. Not only regular people were affected by this issue but also most of outsourcing companies providing from accounting services to search engine optimisation, web design and so on.
Skype is not just a channel for people to phone for free all over the world but in the last years it became one of the most used communication channels for small and even medium businesses all over the world, thus this outage might have cost a lot when it comes to different companies using it for communication. Furthermore, Skype recently started advertising themselves as a great service for larger firms as well, however this outage will definitely put a question mark on whether they should go with Skype’s services or not.