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The two-day outage of one of the world’s largest peer-to-peer (P2P) internet services has raised concerns about the technology’s robustness.

P2P networks are touted as the future of internet distribution for video and TV, since the high bandwidth that would normally be provided by central servers is instead shared between individual network members, removing the problem of data bottlenecks.

But on 16 August, the Skype internet telephony network, which depends on P2P, . MIllions of users’ computers had rebooted almost simultaneously during a routine update of Windows software. This reduced the network’s resources, and when that multitude of freshly rebooted computers sent their combined log-in requests to Skype, its servers buckled.