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Skype Outage Has Outzied Impact on Small Business

Om Malik’s broadband blog has a great set of comments on how the Skype outage has been affecting globalized small businesses… turns out this has become a very important piece of small business infrastucture. GigaOM Open Thread: Did Skype Outage

[...] Skype Recovers - After a week that the folks at Skype will surely want to forget, Skype gets back to [...]

Skype, Webservices and System Redundancy

So, like the rest of the planet we have had a Skype-Outage for a lot of the last few days….its sort of back up now, with a few people appearing and disappearing here and there. However, I read of companies that have stopped using landlines and are now i

Skype: Sometimes Free isn’t Cheap Enough

The recent Skype outage (for more than 24 hours) should pose as a concern to those who have become too dependent on Skype.
Many Australians doing business online have found it a “must-have” app when dealing with clients all over the world….

I downloaded yahoo messenger, and shared my id with my teammates, and used for the whole day.
Someone while chatting in yahoo asked me if he can do chat conferencing in yahoo, I said yes( and said to myself, do people think skype can only do conferencing? is skype=chatmessenger).

Om,

It hasn’t completely KO’d me. But considering I’m traveling now and have developers dispersed internationally, it’s been a real pain in the rear..that’s for sure. Considering that it’s been over 24 hours and the problem is still not resolved, I’m beginning my search for a replacement or at least a backup. I will definitely rely less on Skype in the future and will have a redundant service available at all times.

The some of Joost developers on the #joost IRC channel @ freenode said it had effected the non techies @ Joost to communicate effectively and they depend on Skype heavily and use it internally of course.

I rely on Skype as a business phone in a building where my cell phone doesn’t work. So, with Skype being out, I worked at home today. Not a big deal, but an inconvenience. Just as I am writing this, it appears that Skype has come back online for me.

I have an interview scheduled in a little bit, and I’m hooking up my MD recorder to my land line phone right now. Feels like going back to the stone age …

So it looks like the old question is still open: What is your Skype strategy?

Skype = free = no guarantees!!!

If you use Skype or any other free service as a vital business tool you have no right whining.

Don’t use it for work yet, but had been considering it. Will definetly not switch over entirely unless I see some method of redundancy (e.g. automatic failover to copper).

I quit relying on Skype 2 years ago after they changed my password behind my back. I couldn’t login and couldn’t get any help and lost my account and patience after 2 weeks. Then I knew Skype was a second-rate organization.

Our team at ikbis.com is dispersed over 5 countries (Jordan, UK, Germany, Ukraine). We almost exclusively use Skype for chats and voice conferences. This morning we tried to have a conference call and it was a disaster. One of our partners in London ended up using regular phone conferencing and we patched in people through our mobiles.

No everyone had Gizmo Project downloaded and installed. After this Skype blackout we will make sure we have all have Gizmo accounts as backups.

MSN Messenger is not an option for us because some of us are PC users while others are Mac users. MSN on the Mac has no voice features.

THe extended Skype blackout was pretty shocking to us and exposed how much we depend on it.

It’s been a pain but with two cell phones and other net channels as backup (Gizmo for outbound calls and other IM for chat) it’s been more of an inconvenience than a damaging blow. As of this moment, Skype’s been up for a couple of hours so maybe the worst is past.

We were considering moving to Skype as our primary phone, but now we will not. Our phone service would never go down for 2 days and cell phones wouldn’t either. So, if that is the market that Skype wants to compete with, they need to do better than this.

I think right now it is more of an inconvenience than a disaster. Here’s an email I got from a company that uses Skype for all international calls and video conferencing: “Time to move to Gizmo, baby!”

The big question is how they will address it - are they in a position to say to users, with authority, that this will not happen again? If they can’t, more people will need to get backups…

This one cost eBay big time…let alone the lack of productivity that small business has experienced. The intangible impact of this outage isn’t even quantifiable…is it?

Is anything ever really FREE?

oops, forgot the disclosure: I used to work at eBay (which owns Skype) for many years.

eBay has a history of being able to bounce back from worse outages (1998, anyone?), so let’s hope they do so here as well.

I think messaging and backing up that message with execution will be key…

Yes!

This has forced a quick review of Skype’s competition. We turned a multipoint conference call into computer speakerphone call, did OK, but wouldn’t want to keep doing it.

The outage shouldn’t hurt Skype’s free side too much. Google Talk has much better voice quality, but no conference calls (that I could find). Yahoo! Messenger does conferences, but kicks off a 3-ring circus each time you launch it. Since you can’t quit MS Messenger once it starts, I never let it on to systems any more. Skype is still best for managing free PTP and conference calls, and nobody wants to re-enter all those addresses.

The paid side of Skype’s business should take a pasting. Why would you give out a SkypeIn number when the company can’t keep it working? There are plenty of services that integrate into Outlook and give you good VOIP calls, and now everyone knows that they need to have at least one of these, which will siphon money from Skype (though Skype’s combo of land-line and computer support remains tops).

We were about to ditch our office phones and switch over to Skype In/Out. It goes without saying but we’ll be looking at other alternatives.

This is worth mentioning AGAIN. Skype needs to focus more on customer service and their network. I surely thought after EBay purchased them, Skype would utilize their servers instead of relying on public supernodes.

This is the weak link in Skype’s entire infrastructure. Yet they harp on voice quality and ignore the real issues.

I already detested Skype, so this outage gave me a good way of switching my nearest colleagues away from it.

Voice interrupts too much and we got by with regular phone coverage for that. For chat using a multi-protocol client (Adium, Pidgin) is by far the most reliable, if everybody has at least a couple of accounts.

Maybe just a coincidence, but during the downtime two fraudulent payments for skype credit using paypal through my skype account happened. I’m around 60 Euros out of pocket.

Contacted skype but I guess they are pretty busy currently so no response.

I use to rely on Skype and pay them quite a bit of money for Skype out, but thanks to this farce, I’m going to stick to my normal phone.

Yes, it costs more - doesn’t stop working without explanation (”not caused by hackers” is not an explanation in my books).

I think anyone who builds their business around a free service, should have alternatives.

Companies who need IM should at least have a private jabber service on standby, and real phone lines.

If business is so critical you can’t have outages, then you should probably have backups because ALL services experience outages at one time or another.

Skype Aftermath Technical analysis

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i don’t know why everyone is whinging. how much are you paying for skype? who would rely on a business tool for which you don’t pay anything? i dont think skype ever promised perfect reliability! however even BT landlines go down–except in this case you have recourse to BT. there are lots of alternatives out there but perhaps looking at organisations that can’t afford to have a lot of downtime or have redundancy built in to their networks might be a better bet.
as one of the posters said, you get what you pay for!

As a student I rely on Skype for making phone calls to US and Canada when my cell phone minutes are up. And especially these days when I am stuck in Canada waiting for my visa renewal (and considering the monopoly of Canadian GSM operators) I am totally dependent on Skype to call out. I am still not able to connect to the network and paying heft phone bills.

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The discipline can be divided into long-term and short-term decisions and techniques. Capital investment decisions are long-term choices about which projects receive investment, whether to finance that investment with equity or debt, and when or whether to pay dividends to shareholders. On the other hand, the short term decisions can be grouped under the heading “Working capital management”. This subject deals with the short-term balance of current assets and current liabilities; the focus here is on managing cash, inventories, and short-term borrowing and lending (such as the terms on credit extended to customers).

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