Open Thread: Is Skype Outage Affecting Your Work?
August 16th, 2007 (8:25am) Om Malik 21 CommentsTweet This
Skype, one of the primary means of communication for web workers has been on the fritz for past few hours, possibly because of some software upgrades from Microsoft.
Let this be a reminder that Skype is not quite your phone company replacement. This must have impacted thousands (if not millions) of companies and web workers who lost money and productivity.
Are you being impacted by this outage? Is your business suffering as a result? Share your story with others.
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My mobile phone is acting up today as well. The quiet is kind of eerie. To be honest, I’ll probably get a lot more work done without having to answer the phone all the time.
It’s been down longer than two hours – more like 6.5 – you can see the timeline on my blog: http://www.sme-blog.com/comments/skype-having-problems
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It is kind of shocking and weird to have one of your major tools suddenly yanked just like that.
Overall effect on productivity though? 400% increase at least. All of this is inspiring me to try a weekly Skype fast to see how it impacts on my output.
Now if Twitter would die on me instead of just Twitterific randomly refusing to post, I would be all out of excuses…
This sort of thing is one reason I advocate putting multiple contacts on business communications. While my clients know my Skype info, they also know my IM accounts (three of them), e-mail address, and plain old telephone service number. Given the increasingly leaky nature of all of our baskets, I won’t put all my eggs in any of them.
I’m glad I use Call Farwarding. At least I got some calls while my Skype was being down. I know I’ll claim refunds for those calls, but non the less some of the calls were not transfered (got some emails stating people were not able to call me).
Anyway. I hope Skype solves this ASAP, because my business depends on it. I know, I know, but that’s the cheapest way of doing it for me.
# 1990 – AT&T’s long distance telephone network suffers a cascade switching failure.
It happens to telcos too.
I use Skype for personal use to talk to my mother maybe back in
NY and things but this is why I would never bet my business on it. I provide Toll Free TeleConference and WebConference for business and all the time tell people that reliability is the difference when you use us instead of a free solution like Skype.
I hate to make a plug out of this but I would be foolish not to. Anyone interested can contact me at 312-432-5377 or email me at arusso@ganconference.com or check out website at http://www.ganconference.com and put my name in the Comments box on the signup form.
Good luck,
Anthony Russo
Does this mean that the phone company never goes down? It never has an outage, gets bad reception, becomes static-y?
Sorry, but lets be fair
This sucks. I am lost without Skype. I use it for my work. Glad I found an alternative for the calls with Jangl.
I use skype for my business calls; a 12-24 time period to fix this seems a little long.
I use skype for doing remote Rails training sessions. Today I had no appointments, but otherwise, it definitely would have affected my getting work done.
Can’t…..seem….to…..lift….handset, pant, Skype, what have you done to me??????
I use Skype as primary contact with about 50% of my clients. Either text chat or voice/video. Fortunately today I was dealing with clients on e-mail and regular phone. With ongoing clients they will often buy a day of my time and we will connect via Skype to work. Often we will leave the video/voice going as we are reading and iterating through tasks. It is a good way to my customers to see I am focusing on their work and it helps keep me focussed on them as well. It is like a tunnel into their office either a few miles away or some other far part of the globe.
It is pretty annoying, and Skype really need to do something about their service quality. I’m using SkypeIn and issues like malfunctioning voicemail or non-ringing calls are way to frequent, considering this is a payed service.
BTW, is anyone else getting tired of cutesy “Web 2.0″ service-down messages? Skype’s homepage now says: “The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen.” – but not enough to prevent just a plain day long outage from happening, though? ;)
I have to say that from my extensive experience with Skype, it’s not so bad for it to be down today.
My work uses it for conferencing, I (British guy) use it to call my family back in the UK (I’m in USA) and I also use SkypeIn for them to call me… Call quality is usually superb and I’m very satisfied. I have a cell phone and a landline too and I’m old enough to remember having neither of those either… I can survive without Skype for a while…
I can take a day off Skype– and they WERE up periodically, cause I got a few calls in. When I compare Skype’s problems to the number I used to have with an ordinary phone, Skype comes out way ahead.
I rely of Skype to keep in touch with far-flung places. Not to mention the group Skype chats. When I login in the morning I can catch up with discussions that have started … and as the rest of the world sleeps, I can make my own updates.
In the meantime I’ve been using Gtalk and a hastily set up IRC server.