If you are one of Skype’s many users who use the service to make a living or talking to your remote users, then you are straight out of luck. The service this morning is down and the outage is impacting millions of users. So far there is no word from Skype or no comment on their blog as such. On Twitter, Skype posted: “Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations.”
Sorry, not good enough! Skype is one of the key applications of the modern web. It is already a hit with the consumers, and over past few years it has become part of the economic fabric for startups and small businesses around the world. I am not sure we can comprehend the productivity cost of this outage.
In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology shouldn’t see an outage. But that is not really the case – the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. It is not clear why the current outage happened, but it is something that makes me pause.
The outage comes at a time when it is starting to woo larger corporations for business. If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adapting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage. I think Skype is at a critical point in its life – its investors are trying to shepherd the company towards the big corporations. Hiring of new CEO Tony Bates from Cisco Systems is only firms my belief that soon Skype is slowly starting to ignore its core and passionate user group who are happy to spend money on its products – consumers and small businesses.
More importantly, Skype is facing increasing competition from new services, many of them having shown that they can compete with the Internet telephony behemoth. It is not six years ago when Skype had an advantage of riding on the backs of Kazaa. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, the word of mouth has taken on a whole new meaning. The recent launch and fast growth of Viber, a no name company shows that Skype can’t rest on its laurels.
More importantly – it needs to ensure that it is doesn’t go down even for a few minutes.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
- Research Note: What a Skype-Cisco Partnership Could Mean
- Report: U.S. Mobile Venture Capital Investment, Q2 2010
- Report: Google’s Voice Possibilities
