Skype... disrupted. Skype login possibly down for 12-24 hours...
As a Skype user, I was a bit surprised when, after restarting my computer today (due to a crash when I was trying SecondLife with voice, but that's another story), the Skype icon just kept on spinning and spinning saying "Connecting". And then it would be online... and then it wasn't... and then it was... and then it wasn't....
My first sign that it was something larger than my (sometimes flaky) laptop was a Facebook status update by Jim Courtney saying that Skype might have an outage for 12-24 hours. About the same time I saw a tweet from Chris Brogan. The "social networking information sharing network" was hard at work...
A trip to Skype's "Heartbeat" page showed the problem:
Oops.
Nicely, though, Skype staff have posted a status update on their heartbeat page:
UPDATED 14:02 GMT: 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.
So sometime within the next while it will be back up. It will be curious to see if anyone at Skype will provide technical explanations of what happened. I note from another status update that they performed some planned maintenance last night. Perhaps something did not work quite right?
In any event, I would think Skype will need to offer some post-resolution reassurance to all those businesses they are so eagerly courting...
Your tone of post is appropriate for someone who uses skype casually / for personal calls.
Hardly the sort of reliability you'd want if skype advertised itself as a business service... oh, wait, they do!
Posted by: Me | August 16, 2007 at 12:04 PM
@Me (whomever you may be): You're right. I use Skype primarily "casually". I actually mostly use it for IM, honestly, and I really *do* miss today the Skype groupchats that I've used to keep up conversations with a number of people.
Having said that, I *have* given out my SkypeIn number to a number of people, and in fact it's the phone number listed here on this weblog! Anyone trying to call me on that will be out-of-luck.
No, it's not the kind of reliability you want/need in a business service - and so Skype will definitely have some explaining and re-assuring to do.
Thanks for the comment.
Posted by: Dan York | August 16, 2007 at 01:53 PM
Up to now it worked to a certain extent reliable. (If one does not consider the interruoptions when one person cannot hear any longer the other person - usually solved by newly establishing the call).
But this long outage makes me reconsidering my communication concept.
Hope they will reestablish the system as fast as possible.
So let's wait and
see.
thx
alex
Posted by: Viehweider | August 16, 2007 at 02:47 PM
Up to now it worked to a certain extent reliable. (If one does not consider the interruoptions when one person cannot hear any longer the other person - usually solved by newly establishing the call).
But this long outage makes me reconsidering my communication concept.
Hope they will reestablish the system as fast as possible.
So let's wait and
see.
thx
alex
Posted by: Viehweider | August 16, 2007 at 02:47 PM
Up to now it worked to a certain extent reliable. (If one does not consider the interruoptions when one person cannot hear any longer the other person - usually solved by newly establishing the call).
But this long outage makes me reconsidering my communication concept.
Hope they will reestablish the system as fast as possible.
So let's wait and
see.
thx
alex
Posted by: Viehweider | August 16, 2007 at 02:48 PM