ONYD, Skype

(“ONYD” means “Oh No You Didn’t”, for those less familiar with Internet lingo.)

I couldn’t get into Skype today. I thought it has been banned here in the local wifi or something… until I saw this and this. With myself now relying more and more on Skype, it’s a nuisance — but fortunately, I don’t have any urgent business communications needs at this moment, so it’s just that, a nuisance and not a serious loss.

But, but, but… one of the selling points of Skype has always been “there’s no central point of failure, so it can’t go down”. Once you’ve authenticated, it should be a-ok. And I’ve been authenticated on both Mac and Windows for many weeks and never had to hit the login server, yet today I can’t get in.

I personally was selling Skype to many people previously on the above promise. This incident leaves both me and the people I sold it to a bad taste. I can’t help but feel a certain relief that I’m no longer sharing the shame and guilt here. And the right thing to do would be to have an ongoing public incident report and debriefing of what’s going on. Which reminds me of a GREAT example I just read the other day — in July, power in a large hosting company’s colo facility blew and many companies and customers were left in the dark. Here’s their archived report. Skype should do the same if it still wants to be an open friendly company.

UPDATE on Friday: it’s great to see communication on Share, About and Heartbeat. Provides at least some level of assurance. All the best to you guys in fixing it. Now if only my Skype would sign in… it’s 11:43 Eastern time here on the US east coast and still down for me.

UPDATE late Friday night: ok, Skype is up now. Panic over. Shows 4M people online.