Tony Bates, the former Cisco Systems has had better days. For past 24 hours he has been coordinating the efforts to bring up one of the largest communication networks, Skype. Bates, who recently took over as company’s CEO spoke to me, over what else Skype and gave me a status report.
- 16.5 million of 25 million concurrent users are back online, even though you might be seeing lower number in your desktop clients.
- Europe and East Coast users are fully restored.
- The IM, Video and Audio services are back-up.
- The Group Video services and offline IM capabilities are not going to be working for sometime, mostly because Skype is using those servers as super nodes.
- The company will issue an update later today.
“We are brining up the service in a controlled manner,” said Bates. “This outage if anything has made it even more clear how reliant people are on the service.” Bates, who said he is going to take many lessons from this outage.”I am sorry it happened and we are going to be issuing formal compensation to people,” he said. (Details to follow.)
Bates said that the implementation of the new super nodes isn’t going to have a material cost for the company. “We have a fair idea as to what happened, but we are going to do a full postmortem,” said Bates.
