Disruptive Telephony

Skype is experiencing another outage today... to what extent is not clear, but my own anecdotal experience is that it could be large. Skype, of course, is claiming that only "a small number" of users are affected in their only tweet on the subject so far:

They also posted this as a blog post on their Heartbeat site. On a side note, I completely agree with Robin Wauters at TechCrunch that it seems silly to say "a small number":

Companies always say only a small subset of users experience problems when they occur.

I have no clue why they insist on pointing that out like it makes a difference.

Customers are down... and unable to communicate. It doesn't matter if it is a "small number" if you are one of them!

But I digress... the reality is that this does seem to be a much wider outage than "a small number":

• the comments to an Engadget article this morning show people all around the world saying Skype is not working for them;
  
  
• a Twitter search on 'Skype' is FULL of comments of people saying that Skype is down for them;
  
  
• my own colleagues at Voxeo are down around the world (we've fallen back to a Jabber-based backup system)

As I've been writing this post, Peter Parkes at Skype updated the Heartbeat blog post with this news:

A configuration problem has meant that some of you have been disconnected from Skype.

We've identified the cause of the problem, and have begun to address it. If you've been affected, you should start to see improvement in the next hour or so. You shouldn't need to manually sign back in to Skype - it should reconnect automatically when it's able to do so.

We apologise for the disruption to your conversations.

We'll see how quickly we all come back online...

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