* Is Skype still a viable alternative for businesses?
Just two weeks after we suggested that enterprises should consider Skype as one alternative for some but not all business calls, Skype suffered an outage that affected millions of its global customers. The outage occurred mid-week last week and lasted some 12 to 24 hours and prevented users from logging into Skype for both Skype-to-Skype calls and blocked Skype’s messaging capability.
Using its blog, Skype kept users updated with progress reports every few hours. On Thursday (1402 GMT) Skype reported: “Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience. Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.”
By Friday morning (0700 GMT) Skype’s technical staff noted: “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.” By the same time, Skype’s blog had recorded over 350 user responses to the outage in a wide variety of language.
Our observations: First, we still believe that Skype is a viable option for some business calls, although we reiterate our advice that enterprises should still maintain a PSTN or carrier VoIP connection as a more stable platform. Second, we note that Skype’s claim to being important across a global business community can now be substantiated by the far-flung and multilingual comments posted on the Skype blog. And finally, we commend Skype for using a Skype-sponsored blog both to keep user informed on progress and for having courage to giving users a public forum to share their concerns and comments with the entire Skype user community.
