Last week I was on holiday in the wilds of Scotland.
For a good part of my roaming communications I use Skype as a way of always being in touch with people both old world and new (IM, Std Skype and Skype In/Out) wherever I am. During that week in Scotland I was lucky enough (at least I thought so) to actually have Broadband and therefore I could continue my 21st century life without interuption. One part of my communication obsession was the thought of video conferencing with the relatives from the wilds of Scotland, showing the view etc.
So I came to Thursday afternoon to try to impress the ‘ordinary folk’ and found the bizarre situation of my Skype being partly logged in. In other words some contacts were visible in green but the overall status was logged off and attempting to connect. I did all the usual checks and finally started to ask questions outwards to the Internet and also Googling for outages. What did I find? The biggest outage of an 8 million customer communications system that the world has seen (there have not been many outages that have been for up to 2 days). Luckily my business was not substantially interrupted, it would have been different this week.
What was interesting is that there is and has not been a clear, unassailable description of what went wrong that would normally accompany such a large outage for a global piece of infrastructure. Suspicion rules now because of it, and I think the brand of Skype will be permanently damaged by this until they come clean. In other words, I agree wholeheartedly with Ben Metcalfe.
Oh, I have a backup now…
