Skype Outage Hassles Millions of Users
Multiple sources are reporting that Microsoft's popular messaging and voice chat application Skype has been hit by a severe service outage.
The problem seems to be a bug in the application which affects users from seeing each other. Microsoft has stated that they have found the cause of the problem and is slowly working to restore service, however at the time of this writing it seems that a number of global users are still affected.
Link to official Skype status: Skype Heartbeat.
I've been planning to move away from Skype for a while, but its popularity is making it somewhat difficult (akin to the Facebook dilemma: everyone uses it, why switch?) and this outage has underscored the need for redundancy, especially for some things that users view as essential for connectivity. What other similar applications can Soylent recommend?
AWS knocks Amazon, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb offline in MEGA data collapse
Amazon's Web Services (AWS) have been hit by a monster outage affecting the company's cloudy systems, bringing many sites down with it in the process.
The service disruption has hit AWS customers including Netflix, Tinder and IMDb, as well as Amazon's Instant Video and Books websites.
The outage may also explain Airbnb's current service woes. Airbnb is an AWS customer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:45AM
Too big to fail? The internet laughs at that idea... Corruption won't save you when you're servers are hosed.
Back to my subject, run your own services. We need distributed systems, and/or systems which are easy for joe-schmo to set up. These will rely on some serious crypto for security since the data would be more widely available...
We need to stop trusting single orgs with our critical infrastructure. Whether they are trustworthy or not doesn't matter, once a single "system" is entrusted then it only requires compromising that one system to affect millions.
Skype? ha.... microsoft bought it up for the specific purpose of turning it into a revenue stream and sending all skype data through central servers. Very easy to mine the data once it goes through a central location...
Educate the people around you, nearly everyone I talk to uses facebook, yet nearly none of them realizes that the facebook app on their phone can spy on them http://www.geek.com/mobile/facebook-app-now-listens-and-records-audio-when-you-post-updates-from-your-phone-1595873/ [geek.com] (dear god I hope none of you click that link to learn this.... if so then welcome to the future)
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:40AM
Yeah... No, that's not going to work. I suspect you knew that while you were typing it.
You want to say HI to mom, half a world away. And maybe group chat with your posse for the weekend bash, and send some fotos to your friend on the other coast.
Guess what? It will be easier for all those people (except your mom) to get a new friend to replace you than it is to wait for you go get done coding. I suspect you mom won't wait either. She's old. Who has time to wait for a son/daughter who believes its necessary to re-invent the world each time there is a glitch anywhere.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:15AM
Thank god the people I know still know how to use email, and how to use phones the traditional way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @10:07AM
No need to code anything or even install anything new.
https://meet.jit.si [meet.jit.si] is already here, FOSS, and works as well or better than Skype.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @12:15PM
Looks like another solution with a central server. Indeed, I cannot even find a download link for the code (or a link giving further information, or even just an information about who's behind this software/service).
(Score: 2) by TheB on Tuesday September 22 2015, @02:23PM
It helps when you have a link to the project instead of an implementation.
https://jitsi.org/Main/Download [jitsi.org]
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:36PM
I was going to reply with the fact that there are projects already being created, but someone already linked one alternative. Personally I'm not skilled enough to make an alternative at the moment, so yes my mom would be waiting quite a while :P
Your comment seems like it missed my point. This isn't about skype having a glitch so we should make an alternative, its about centralized communications making privacy a joke. In this case yes, re-inventing is needed because privacy requires a solution that doesn't depend on a central server. Perhaps heavy crypto would work, but you still funnel all communications through a central portal.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:05PM
Skype does not funnel all communications through a central server.
Only directory services go through Microsoft servers. Then connections are done via a network of servers, not all of them belong to Microsoft. If you are one of those special people that someone is interested in your Skype sessions do go through ONLY Microsofts servers so that you can be wire tapped.
There are totally distributed solutions for messaging, such as Tox, but of course nobody uses them.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:11PM
Personally I'm not skilled enough to make an alternative at the moment, so yes my mom would be waiting quite a while :P
Then stop making suggestions that everyone go out and roll their own for christ sake!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:47PM
It wasn't a personal critique, or challenge, or anything. It was a general statement about what society needs. Maybe my language was too generalized, "everyone" was actually meant more along the lines of multiple projects that are cross-compatible with options to select encryption schemes.
Centralized control is the issue, and you explained it nicely. With tech we can not guarantee that only the "good guys" have access, so we need alternatives that are not so easily subverted.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:12AM
Since I have neither a facebook account nor a smartphone, I don't keep updated about such things.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mendax on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:22AM
These kinds of outages could doom cloud computing... perhaps. However, as everyone here who knows anything about the history of computing, system failures have been occurring since the days of the ENIAC. Computers and their components break. The issue with cloud computing is that when something fails, the failure can potentially be catastrophic if not fixed quickly. However, cloud computing, virtual machines, auto-replication of data, and hardware redundancy can make this downtime minimal. I suspect that when the history of cloud computing is written, it will turn out to be far more reliable than colocation or hosting one's own servers.
Of course, cloud computing makes computing more of a commodity that can be consumed. As many of you know, this site is hosted in the cloud somewhere. It makes it expansion as it is needed a much easier proposition, and, of course, no servers needed to be found and put in a colo facility somewhere.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:46AM
> As many of you know, this site is hosted in the cloud somewhere
Really? I thought soylent ran on dedicated servers. I guess that still "the cloud" in the most general sense.
But when I hear "cloud" I think VM that can be software migrated and dynamically resized/provisioned.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday September 23 2015, @12:01AM
Provided a Dell hardware RAID hasn't just had a brain fart after a UPS failure, went to “repair” the RAID with the wrong parameters, and promptly fucked your VM up. True story.
That being said, I'm happy to report complete satisfaction with Linode, even though I only use my server in the clouds for hobby projects, so I don't have experience with a site even at Soylent's level. They even allow you to provision at multiple different physical data centers to control for the above scenario, and they're very prompt about reporting outages. In, what has it been, 7 years or so, Linode has never lost a copy of my VM.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:48AM
What percentage of these outages (which are never adequately explained) do you suppose are actually hacking attacks?
American Airlines was down last week as well. That's like the third airline outage this summer.
Nobody wants to admit a hacking, but "technical difficulties" are apparently ok.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:59AM
Man, you find conspiracies under every rock.
The internet is freaking enormous nowadays. A couple of high-visibility outages a month is really low volume.
Besides, hacks are publicly reported all the time, they just aren't sexy enough to make the news unless its credit card numbers or cheating husbands. If nothing else, the think-tanks that are pushing for cyberwar make a point of collecting and summarizing that stuff on a regular basis.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:21AM
Oh, it wouldn't surprise me if many if not most of them are hacking attacks. Cloud computing infrastructure properly implemented should be pretty resilient, with few single points of failure, unless there is a hacker attack.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1) by SanityCheck on Tuesday September 22 2015, @11:11AM
Please, if these were hacking attacks the companies would be falling over themselves to proclaim "SEE IT WASN'T OUR FAULT." More likely it's someone's incompetence. Just like when United Airlines was down for an entire day, I had the inside scoop that someone installed a mis-configured router that was routing traffic in an infinite loop between Chicago and somewhere in Louisiana. Considering what United pays their IT "contractors" (i.e. slaves, which make $20 an hour in some cases with no benefits working through a sub contractor), I am more surprised their systems work at all!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:39PM
Please, if these were hacking attacks the companies would be falling over themselves to proclaim "SEE IT WASN'T OUR FAULT."
I've actually never heard any company make that claim, because everybody knows its STILL their fault.
But I've seen many companies be very circumspect about outages, and the reasons for them, and then fess up months later that they were hacked.
This is the third ground stop American has had this year alone.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday September 22 2015, @09:24AM
Are their occasional outages? Yes, certainly. I don't see why these are any more catastrophic than any other infrastructure failure. If my company's servers are down, it doesn't really matter whether they were in the cloud or in the back room closet.
The earlier poster suggests running your own infrastructure, but he neglects to pose the key question: will you have fewer outages? Are you sure?
Even you would have higher reliability, you then have all the additional time, effort and cost of actually running your own infrastructure. Those costs are considerable, most especially the salaries of the people doing it. Is the extra reliability (if there is any) worth that cost?
Of course, there are other arguments to be considered as well, for example, security. I would never put anything on a cloud service in the USA, for example, but for the moment I do have things on AWS in the EU.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:23AM
What other similar applications can Soylent recommend?
Every iPhone and every Android comes with a face to face video calling capability. So why add Skype?
Even Facebook has video chat.
I don't know a single individual that uses Skype.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:38AM
We need a mod +5 old ;) I kid, sorta... I still know some people on skype and I log on about 1x a month to say hi, but otherwise its a dying platform that microsoft is trying to suck dry.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:17AM
It may be news to you, but there are people who don't use a smartphone (and anyway, can an iPhone user communicate with an Android user using the built-in face-to-face functionality?)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:40AM
Or someone on his/her laptop? Most folks I know use skype (and Google+, and a couple of other similar services) for work calls occasionally when away from the office.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Tuesday September 22 2015, @01:55PM
ORLY? I have an Android phone SG3, care to enlighten me on the video calling app?
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:43PM
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/video-chat-in-android,news-21297.html [tomsguide.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:04PM
Link does not support your claim.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:07PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:27PM
"Comes with" implies if you go to the store and buy and android device it will come with Google Hangouts pre-installed.
There was a time when there was a different app available to do the same thing, (it was called Google Talk) and the article
was written at the time of transition.
But today, you would be hard pressed to find an Android device without that app. And if you want to put every Google app in some kind of quarantine you won't buy and Android device, and might have to use Apple, or a dumb cell phone. But then if you have that mentality, you would also put Skype in quarantine because it is already back doored both to Microsoft and the NSA.
So you would end up just calling your friends to maintain privacy, and give up the idea of video calls. Oh wait... That won't work either. Stingrays!
So your mind set can't tolerate any of these chat solutions, and you have no business posting on this thread.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Wednesday September 23 2015, @06:08PM
And your comment was written yesterday.
Wow, forget to take your meds today?
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday September 23 2015, @07:09PM
And your comment was written yesterday.
Why yes, yes it was, and there is no need to download anything, because every Android and IOS smartphone sold today, or yesterday, comes with a video chat application pre-installed. Its been this way for well over a year.
Wow, forget to take your meds today?
Yes. Yes I did forget. Thanks for reminding me. My blood pressure does tend to rise when suffering fools.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by DutchUncle on Tuesday September 22 2015, @04:10PM
... and I bet you were using Skype *before* it was cool.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:47PM
I was using skype when it was Estonian.
Now that the NSA bought it for Microsoft, I just don't see the point.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Qlaras on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:55PM
So when I have a Windows Phone, you've got an Android and Bob over there has an iPhone...how do we all talk since FaceTime and Google Hangouts are proprietary and only available for their OS? So we all have to live within someone's walled garden ecosystem to communicate, and to hell with 'choice' of phone manufacturer...
(Yes, I know Skype for non-Android Linux has kinda died off...its about the only exception to the "runs everywhere" mantra of Skype)
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:08PM
Hangouts is cross platform.
Facebook video chat is as well.
There are others, but they are less well known.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:42AM
Hey, jerks. You know there are other regions than US East, right?
I've been using AWS heavily for five years straight and I never have outages. But I never run anything in US East.
There are so many other regions to choose from, see? Here's a helpful list of other regions you can use. You like lists.
US West Oregon
US West California
EU Ireland
EU Frankfurt
Asia Pacific Singapore
Asia Pacific Tokyo
Asia Pacific Sydney
South America Sao Paulo
Why put everything in US East Virginia? It's not even the cheapest. US West Oregon costs the same, and it's not overloaded all the time.
Stop putting everything in US East. You're causing your own outages because you're overloading US East. Stop putting everything in US East.
You won't stop putting everything in US East, will you? Of course you won't. Enjoy your outages, fuckwits!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @04:08PM
They put stuff in US East because that is where their customers are clustered.
The issue is the apparent lack of redundancy on the part of the AWS customer in that they are ONLY putting their eggs in the US East basket.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday September 22 2015, @06:52AM
http://universe2.us/collector/nofucks.jpg [universe2.us]
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:11AM
Skype and Amazon Web Services Outages Hassle Millions
Mildy annoyed, perhaps, but hassled? Did the outages start shoving people around?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:57AM
Of course it did! In the world of apps and smartphones, when things that people stare at 80% of their time awake stops working, they start hassling themselves!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 22 2015, @08:26AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @09:01AM
When moving to the cloud, don't be surprised if you're left out in the rain.
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Tuesday September 22 2015, @02:57PM
Personally, I like Telegram [telegram.org] for text-based communication. It's partially open source, you can use it on Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and it's pretty seamless. Start a conversation on your smartphone, pick it up on your computer at home. Couldn't tell you about video-based communication as I try to avoid that whenever possible.
(Score: 1) by elixir on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:22PM
It seems like most Big Tech Corporations are having issues with their software recently. Do you think this is due to outages/external problems... Or do you think this is due to buggy code?
I am sure many of these company's have engineers hacking away to their code all hours of the day. There are bound to be issues. What do you guys think?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday September 22 2015, @10:46PM
Spoilers: It's just someone else's server.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday September 22 2015, @10:49PM
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!