Skype-craziness

So, Skype is known for penetrating firewalls and working even in NATted environments, but what I experienced yesterday, that was behind my imagination…

Internet here on Bali broke once again. I had the connection to the wireless access point at almost 100% and I could ping our router. No traceroute to anywhere behind the router (I guess it’s DSL) was possible. My conclusion: Internet dead, the router can not connect to the provider. I could not ping anything on the web, a traceroute ended at 192.168.1.x, the router’s IP address. DNS was dead, ICQ was not working, MSN neither, the ntp-daemon did not get a connection, either. Basically, no connection.

Now, there is Skype. It still worked!!! I could chat, I could phone. I have no idea, how that was done… The only reason I could think about would be, that another computer here was connected to Skype before the connection broke. It seemed to somehow have kept alive the connection and due to some strange behavior of my Skype, I could connect, too.

If anyone could give me some insight on this, leave a comment! And sorry for not having more information about the network, but I did not have time to investigate further and with only one wireless card, not even wireshark or anything similar was useful…