what will be the impact of the recent outage on skype? August 18th, 2007  

Over at Disruptive Telephony, Dan York writes about the impact of Skype’s recent massive log-in outage.

The seductive aspect of Skype is that it makes it very simple and easy to use the product. It has (at least for the moment) a massive directory of users. It has APIs that let it be readily integrated with other web sites and services. It’s easy to use… and I expect that probably many if not most users will simply go back to using it as they have always done once it comes back into full operation. People have short-term memories…

Certainly, Skype has become an infrastructure layer on the net, as so many services are built on top of it. It was interesting to see
how much functionality I was personally unable to use. Crazily, as I was still logged in to Skype through iSkoot on my cellphone, that was the only way I could gauge whether Skype was becoming available again. “Are my contacts there yet”. Skype’s prolonged unavailability also raises questions about reliability of such software, as it was not the service itself, but merely access to it that was disabled. Important to keep this in mind: it has convinced me, that adding a layer to control access to a VOIP service is not the way I wish to have my VOIP needs met. SIP based protocols are becoming more available now, and I consider that a good thing. Meanwhile, for my international telephony needs, I gladly trade add-ons and plug-ins for Rebtel’s elegant simplicity: assign local numbers to my contacts, call them using just my mobile phone, done. No web based software, no log-ins.

By: admin