P2P Internet voice calling company Skype had a massive outage last week. The outage was caused by an overloaded cluster of support servers for offline IM. In order to compensate Skype’s paid users, the company is offering a $1 worth of credit towards the service.
“Although Skype staff responded quickly to disable the overloaded servers and to eliminate client requests to them, a significant number of supernodes had already failed. A supernode is important to the P2P network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients, helping to establish connections between them and creating local clusters typically of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode,” said Skype CIO Lars Rabbe.
[Neowin]