Skype Working

It seems Skype is indeed up and running once again. As you may recall, TMCnet’s Tom Keating broke the news of the outage last week when he heard many of the TMC team members were not able to communicate with one another.

I recently wrote about Skype stabilizing two days ago. It seems now the software/service has gone from stabilizing to working correctly.

This is an e-mail I received yesterday from Skype’s PR agency:

Good Morning,

I’m pleased to share the most recent information on the Skype outage with you:

"Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal."

"On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order."

"We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!"

Skype released that statement a little after 11 AM GMT this morning (8/18/07). Please expect information to arrive on Monday that more clearly answers the questions you have on this matter.

If there is anything I can assist you with in the interim, please let me know.

Have a great weekend.

Ryan Wallace

Kaplow for Skype

What is amazing to me is how Skype has been able to run for so many years and with so many millions of users without such a problem. We have seen similar outages from hosted software companies like Salesforce.com but in Skype’s case, most of it’s services are free. The point I suppose is Skype is a complimentary service yet has been relatively stable for many years. This is the first major outage I recall. Still, the length of the outage is obviously a major challenge for the world’s most popular VoIP software company.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t been able to verify Skype is working 100% myself yet as not all of my contacts are online this weekend. One of the problems I had with the software last week centered around some of my contacts not showing up online when in fact their own local machine’s showed them online.

What is important to note is how businesses were affected by such outages. Many companies do indeed use Skype and one wonders how they coped with the outage. This will make a great story in the upcoming weeks for sure.

If you want to stay up to date on the latest details, be sure to check out my blog at tehrani.com, Tom Keating’s blog or the Skype news page on TMCnet.