August 17th, 2007
Skype is back (for some); damage to reputation is done
Skype apparently is back online now for some–test calls seem to work without issue. Unfortunately the damage to Skype’s reputation is done.
Whether Skype’s outage was due to an exploit or an algorithm doesn’t really matter. What matters is there were small businesses that actually depended on Skype and were let down. I’d certainly think twice before relying on Skype.
Skype noted in its blog that it was on the road to recovery (Techmeme).
As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.
We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.
An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.
Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.
We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.
Unfortunately, this outage will not be forgotten easily. And at the time of this posting Skype’s performance was spotty. It was running for some folks and down for others.
Skype’s hiccup also cast doubt on peer-to-peer as a technology that can maintain high levels of uptime.
Michael Krigsman, one of those users that relies heavily on Skype, wrote in a recent post:
Large-scale business adoption of Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure applications, such as Skype, will only occur when these new technologies can survive comparison with established utilities. Society has demanded that basic services — water, phone, electricity, roads, and so on — must adhere to certain levels of reliability and availability. Likewise, business users expect their software infrastructure to provide high reliability, especially in mission-critical domains.
That’s a key point. It’s also clear that Enterprise 2.0 is not ready for prime time. For now, keep your land line on standby.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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