Disruptive Telephony

Yesterday Skype had another outage. This one apparently was only minor and affected people logging in to Skype or using inbound phone numbers (what we used to call "SkypeIn" numbers). It didn't affect me at all - Skype worked fine for me.

Skype's recovered from the outage... but what I find a bit annoying is that there seems to be no real information about what happened.

There is a brief post on the Skype Heartbeat site which says only that things are "returning to normal" but that there might still be problems with:

• Signing in to Skype, Skype manager, the developer site, and the forums
• Buying Skype Credit or subscriptions
• Making calls to landlines and mobiles

But that's it... no word that they've fully recovered and no information about what the issue was.

Tales From Twitter

The best guess is what we can glean from their Twitter stream:

So apparently per this tweet the outage was caused "by an ISP failure".

On The Need For Transparency

Here we are a day later and there is complete silence from Skype's online sites. Nothing more on Twitter. Nothing on the blogs that I could see. I poked around a bit in the Skype community forums but nothing jumped out at me.

C'mon Skype!

If you learned one thing from the last outage back in December I would have hoped it was that we all want to hear from you and more importantly want to hear details about what is happening with the service we are using.

Communication and transparency reassure us... and create loyal and happy customers.

What caused the outage? If it was with "an ISP", why did it take out the login services? Why were SkypeIn numbers affected? Was it a single point-of-failure?

More importantly, what are you doing so that this doesn't happen again? Are you looking at redundant connections? Or distributing functionality?

Help us, Skype... help us understand that you want our business/usage and that we should be reassured that you are making sure these outages don't happen again.

You are a communication company - PLEASE COMMUNICATE!

Thanks!

P.S. While I didn't experience any problems with Skype yesterday, Andy Abramson did and wrote about his issues.

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