Disruptive Telephony

As of this moment, Skype is back working for me and tells me that 3,181,959 people are online.  However, given the performance this morning, I am not expecting it to stay up.  It's been fading in and out all day.

The last we heard from Skype was about six hours ago in their "Where we are at 1100 GMT" post. The comments (currently 81) to that post are quite fascinating to read.  Some are the typical kind of outrage you expect.  Some are passing along the latest speculation. Some are giving reports of continued outage.  Some include links to news articles.  Some bash Skype.  Some praise Skype.  As is typical, some bash other commenters (like this one apparently from a Skype-using-solider in Iraq).  Some plead for a return.  Some suggest alternatives

In the midst of that (and the other entries with comments: here(183), here(54) and here (64)), you see the comments dealing with the human side:

I miss my friends!!

Thanks for the information, I miss my parents in Mexico, they have the same problem as well, hope today the system comes back

come on guys i need to make an important phone calls plz fix it as soon as possibles

I've not seen any changes in service. Pretty fed up because this is important to bme doing business with my clients.

Now I know not to take a conversation with my boyfriend, who currently is living in Denmark, for granted. Irritating indeed

Hey everyone in the world using SKYPE...wow didn't realize how much we all rely on SKYPE. We use SKYPE for our business. That is how we connect to the world. We connect to all of our contacts using SKYPE. We miss it terribly. All I see is a grey X...need to see the green CK MARK! We basically used our cell service and emails it worked..but made it hard to teleconference...tomorrow is another day Skype..hope we are connected.

I had to plan a flight today with some one in the U.K. this was not very easy sending text messages back and forth on our mobile phones. This problem needs to be fixed soon

Please, please try to resolve this system glitch soon. My business relies so much on Skype voice calls. We are losing business connections every hour if skype isn't availabe.

Hurry it up! This is bad for business!!

You get the idea.  (Kudos to Skype, by the way, for leaving their blog comments open during this situation.)  In another forum where someone was venting, the person somewhat frantically wrote this:

yes but I put my skypein phone # on my resume!!!!

Ouch.

I, too, am impacted to a degree.  Although I am more of a casual user of Skype, i.e. I don't rely on Skype for communication, the number I put in the sidebar to this blog is my SkypeIn number.  Why?  Just because I didn't want to put my home or cell number and figured that it might be a good way to test SkypeIn.  (And in the 7 months I've had it up there I've probably had maybe 2 calls on it resulting from the blog!)  But still, this does cause me to rethink that.  (In fact, I may very shortly change the sidebar number to my GrandCentral number as a layer of redirection.)

The outage looks like it will continue for a while. (I am disconnected again in the time it took me to write this.)  And in the meantime there are real people out there suffering because they have come to depend upon a particular VoIP provider. 

Yes, I work for a company that on one level could be seen as competing with Skype when it comes to business (but we don't run into Skype, really), but an outage of this length isn't good for us as an industry.  Already there are voices out there saying that this shows inherent weaknesses in P2P VoIP (it doesn't, in my opinion).  Perhaps the good news is that people are looking around at alternatives and they are asking these questions now about availability. 

Julian Bond said it perhaps best in an IRC chat room today:

This debacle is proving to be a bit of a shocker. I guess we all got lulled into thinking that Skype was at least as reliable as the Cell networks.

Yes, we did.  Some much more than others (especially those who dropped their landlines and used it for business).

In another post when this is all over, I'll write a bit more from the security side about "lessons learned", but for the moment I think we need to remember that there are real people right now being impacted by all of this.  For better or worse, Skype has become a communication that is (or has been) relied upon by many.  Hopefully the folks in Estonia and other locations can get this fixed soon.