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kraftman
didnt skype used to be p2p so that things like this wouldnt happen?
shin_lao
It used to be. But Microsoft made it more centralized.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
mironathetin
Indeed, great move.

Although, judging upon the number of comments, no-one seems to care that much.

yread
Well they said it was because of the post-pc era, more mobile phones connecting to skype, mobile phones are not really suited for p2p video streaming. But then they somehow managed to make skype mobile experience so bad that it probably wouldn't be that big of a problem
Mahn
It was never fully p2p was it? Calls and messaging may have been p2p at some point before Microsoft, but you still needed an account managed by a centralized entity to authenticate with the service.
Jasper_
Heavens no. Skype used to be extremely unreliable back when it was P2P-based. Calls or voice used to drop for minutes at a time. Text messages would get lost to the aether, or come in doubles or triples.

Skype peers were unreliable, so they identified good peers, which they tagged as SuperNodes, or SNs. Large amounts of these SuperNodes could go down in an instant due to network outages out of their control, buggy software, bad computers, and more. The Skype blog is full of "whoops, too many supernodes went down!" from 2008-2011.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110829025128/http://blogs.skype...

They then added dedicated "mega-supernodes" which they just shoved in an EC2 cloud, and after non-mega SN population declined as mobile took off, they just turned off the P2P-based SN feature.

Ace17
Tox-im is peer to peer, and calls work rather well (voice + video).
viach
Weird, I also had troubles with Skype today and tried Hangouts - it worked very well (means not that terrible experience as usually). Coincidence?
bad_user
Hangouts worked for us a couple of hours ago, but half an hour ago it stopped working, triggering errors. I believe a lot of people jumped on it and it's also having hiccups.

Also, Skype just recovered for us, we're having a call in 4 as I'm writing this. EDIT: Skype is still misbehaving.

xrjn
Still having issues connecting - a few hours ago I couldn't sign in, now I'm having trouble loading my contact list.
johansch
That headline seems to downplay it a lot. It was totally down for at least 6 hours.

I introduced Slack to the team today...

kanusterkund
Which one? The one that says "Skype Down" or the tabloid one that screams "Skype DOWN: Microsoft messenger and video chat app NOT working across the GLOBE"?
johansch
Twenty minutes ago it said "Skype down for some customers". Now both the HN title and the target website title has been edited.
helical
http://isskypedown.com is actually a thing, and it should redirect to https://slack.com/pricing
lewisl9029
Do we have any reason to assume Slack would do any better than Skype with respect to availability in the long term though?

You should really be looking at an on-premises solution if availability is really that much of a concern, in my own humble opinion.

petecoop
I also introduced Slack to the team, and now we're not going back!
tluyben2
Still 'down' here (in Spain) however it was never really down for us (NL/ES/UK); it says you are offline and all in the list are offline but chatting and calling etc just works as normal (I called phone numbers, Skype users and chatted) even though it reports offline. If you logout however you cannot login again. I don't have a business account.
wavesum
no skype here yet (finland)