GigaOM

[...] is now back online after over 30 hours of down time. This shock the world. We have all come to depend on great internet products and communication by [...]

[...] made no statement, gave no assurances to their community, leaving their PR agency and the blog to keep people informed. Of course, this led to even more speculation, rumors and [...]

Was down for about 30 hours for me. That is an extremely long outage. I’m very interested to read the explanation.

I’m looking forward to that explanation as well…Though I still trust them. I know all things networked are inherently faulty - its amazing how one little change or device can cause horrible sleepless nights.

@ David - ‘Though I still trust them.’

It’s amazing how being honest and transparent like Skype has been over the past 30 hours or so can be such a powerful PR tool. My guess is, had they ‘passed the buck’ to something/someone else, people would be leery of them in the future. But because they owned up to the problem and accepted responsibility, people will go on trusting them. Counterintuitive, but a powerful message :)

We can understand the outage it happens everywhere, but the above statement seems to be not serious. They think it is fun. I hope they better have some good excuses and be genuine come Monday.

My service was down, intermittently, for about 12 of 24 hours.

Over the years, considering how much “reliability” I could count on from public monopolies like AT&T or my electricity source here in NM - I consider the single hiccup from Skype next to invisible.

It takes a truly neurotic geek to require more than that - especially when we’re mostly getting a free ride.

love skype, glad it is back up. hope they learned more than one lesson in this.

Skype’s honesty was a bit mixed, too. What were they thinking when they were congratulating themselves on their heartbeat page for getting chat and other services working, when the same page acknowledged that users couldn’t sign in to use these services?

I do like their sense of honesty towards the situation.

However, what was most confusing was their heartbeat page kept on showing 4 big beating hearts for Skypein, skypeout, voicemail and SMS were all working normally when you couldn’t log in.

It’s the equivalent of saying the TV, computer and refrigerator are fine in your house, while you are locked out.

I bet Milo, IT Administrator “extraordinare” didn’t quite think out the new database cluster architecture. The spent all those hours rebuilding a corrupted database. woohoo

It doesn’t change the fact that they should have some redundancy and backup solutions to make a switch to in situations like this. Looks like Skype, despite their P2P architecture, is still too centralized.

One failure shouldn’t affect the whole world, and two days of downtime is a huge amount of time. It makes them less than three nines in availability notation:
(link)

Despite the fact that you still “love them” or “trust them”, it will cost them much, both in money and reputation.

when I realized that skype to skype, skype to phone and phone to skype was shut down I understood that other pieces were being moved into place to facilitate the monitoring of all communication that flows through skype.

I don’t think skype can come out and say this for fear of being shut down permanently.

When someon says, “trust me”…that should be a red flag…or at least a signal that “I’m trying to communicate with you but my black mailer is listening in so please understand what I’m trying to communicate to you without my having to put it in so many words”

Yeah…