Skype: Two Nines of Reliability
Source: saunderslog.com
Skyp. looks like it’s bac. this morning. At least, we’re logged in here i. Ottawa, although I don’t see anyone else logged in that I know. . The various explanations making the rounds this morning are interesting — everything ranging from a denial of service attack to the official Skype explanation (”it’s a bug”… how illuminating).
What conclusions can we draw from this?
- The much vaunted peer-to-peer architecture really isn’t that peer, nor that secure. Something has taken down the entire Skype network, and it seems to have been triggered by a software update to a login server controlled by Skype.
- Five nines uptime matters. Anyone who moved their landlines to Skype for business purposes got a nasty awakening yesterday. Five nines reliability is less than five minutes of downtime per year. What we all experienced yesterday was a little better than two nines — a twenty four hour outage.
- Building quality software is harder than it looks. The kids in Redmond take a lot of abuse for the quality of Windows, the number of patches they put out, and the lengthy periods of time between upgrades. Never hav. we seen every Windows PC stop operating globally for a twenty four hour period.
Over and out.
