Millions of people across the globe use Skype every day to IM, video chat or Skype Out! Today… not so much. Skype suffered a major outage today, and for a company (like mine) who uses it to communicate with employees, clients, members of the media, etc., it was (and at the time of this posting still is) a royal pain. We had to resort to (gasp!) email! I even had to call a few folks on the phone. My dependency on Skype is another issue entirely, but if you are equally as Skype-dependant, @robpegoraro offers a couple alternatives here: http://wapo.st/hTbbbd
What I am really interested in is how Skype is handling this from a PR point of view. It turned to the Twittersphere to keep its 50,862 followers informed with regular updates; and to Facebook to notify the 1,604,009 people who ‘Like’ Skype of the status update posted on its blog in both English and German. BTW- thank you Skype for the explanation of ‘supernodes’.
Skype has been reassuring users for the past 5 hours that things are returning to normal. Define “normal”. For me (and I can safely assume millions of others), things are not back to normal. I suppose we can anticipate an eventual return to Skype normalcy, but I wish Skype would stop promising it.
To compound the issue, when digging around the Skype web site, I got a few Problem Loading Page errors, mainly when I clicked on the “About Us” link and http://heartbeat.skype.com/, which is supposed to let people know the status of any network issue. What good is a status update page during an outage if that page doesn’t even work?
Ultimately, I’m glad Skype is communicating with its users about something so we know they’re working on it. However, the communiqué IMHO seems a bit pedestrian. Continually letting people know you’re working on it is like a “check’s in the mail” response. We know it’s not working. We now know you’ve been working on it. Let us know when it’s fixed.
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