Live data from Hacker News

Great. Skype is down.

thenextweb.com

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you missed some steps there: - Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. - Discover that you also need A records (that now collides with webserver on your domain), because not every client supports SRV. (and some also need NAPTR) - Discover that half of the phones are not compatible with your server out of the box. - Discover that to support vendor A you need to enable X and to support v…

Yeah. I also didn't supply server setup instructions and service configuration examples. Sorry. We do have a distributed voip network. But yes, it does need work to improve it. Skypes simplicity is what makes it so popular.

What I was trying to say is that currently - no, we do not have any sane working solution. It's not about setting up and configuration. It simply doesn't work as advertised. It's not distributed (unfortunately) and half of the industry works very hard to prevent it from being distributed (although I wouldn't attribute it to malice).

XMPP/jingle is in a much better position to be the distributed answer. SIP is not.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I also didn't supply server setup instructions and service configuration examples. Sorry. We do have a distributed voip network. But yes, it does need work to improve it. Skypes simplicity is what makes it so popular.

What I was trying to say is that currently - no, we do not have any sane working solution. It's not about setting up and configuration. It simply doesn't work as advertised. It's not distributed (unfortunately) and half of the industry works very hard to prevent it from being distributed (although I wouldn't attribute it to malice). XMPP/jingle is in a much better position to be the distributed answer. SIP is not.

Ok, I was simply addressing this nonsensical comment:

"I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many reasons. Peer-to-peer anything comes with its own truckload of problems, and would do more harm here than good (as with the DNS)."

Thank you for mentioning Jingle. I was not aware of its existence.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#34
post #18
post #8

Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

you're welcome. it's a pretty bad outage though. we're fixing it.

Any hints as to the problem? Affecting Global Index or something else?

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#36
Can anyone suggest a quick alternative to skype conference calling? Today is the one day I actually had an important use for this and it goes down...

A phone line could work, but is not ideal due to distance. Thanks.

UPDATE: Skype just signed me in. Anyone else have this happen? UPDATE2: Back down again after only a few minutes. Hopefully they're close to a fix.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're welcome. it's a pretty bad outage though. we're fixing it.

Any hints as to the problem? Affecting Global Index or something else?

it's a bug :)

here's some official info http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/skype_downtime_today.html

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#39
post #8

Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

My landline at home has never* had an outage in 27 years.

* that I'm aware of

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My cell phone service has never failed in my home.

My AT&T iPhone has never failed to fail in San Francisco.

My point is that many people would hold home phone service to a higher level of reliability than the ability to browse lol cats on 3G. The only reason I ditched my landline is because cell phone service is so darn reliable where I live. If Skype wants to replace landlines, it's not unreasonable for people to hold them to that standard.
Post reply on HN