Skype outage, Microsoft and some communication rules
I want to make this last post about last week’s Skype outage because there’s a post on Microsoft Security Response Center blog that raised my eyebrows. I don’t think I’ve seen any of Microsoft’s more high-profile blogs address Skype matters this explicitly before, which further underlines that the outage was a very serious thing. For full context, see also Villu’s original post and clarification.
Some people called my own previous post Skype bashing. It may have had a bit of drama in it, but hey, folks. The facts are thus: Skype had a global outage of two days. None of the cable/Internet/mobile/other-communication companies that I’ve interacted with over the past ten years have had an outage of this length and magnitude. Skype got it fixed, and that’s great. Events like this always eat into the “trust credit limit” that any company has from its customers. What it means in practice and in the long run remains to be seen. I personally was annoyed, but it would be even more annoying and costly for me to look for some other solution because apart from the outage, Skype keeps working great for me and hopefully there won’t be any other glitches of this magnitude any time soon any more. Skype has also posted an explanation of what happened that sounds fairly plausible.
Now I’m not really sure what’s up with the Microsoft connection and why there needed to be these follow-up posts from both sides. As Villu said, “It’s not what you say. It’s what they hear.” So my guess is that someone, somewhere read what was posted and got annoyed and set some background communication in motion that resulted in the followup posts.
(And the following is no longer referring strictly to this outage case any more… it’s more of a general idea where this outage case is just one example, and I believe it’s more an example of how to get things right than the opposite.) It’s difficult to get everything right the first time. The more high-profile you are, the more eyeballs you have tracking everything that you do and the more likely it is that someone “up there” is not going to like something that you do.
Whenever this happens, then you have a choice if you’re the person on the receiving/reading end and come across something you don’t like. The first option is to immediately assume malicious intent and that the poster did something nasty on purpose and is out there to get you, and that the right way to get back would be to call names, start a fight and make the fuss even bigger.
The second option is to assume that everyone is a reasonable person with noble purposes, and that there may be nothing more than a just different understanding of what some word and sentences say or mean. And there’s always a simple way to fix this, and that would be with further follow-up communication. I do believe that it’s always better to over- rather than undercommunicate, and that’s especially true at the time of crisis. (Any basic PR and crisis management textbook will tell you the same thing.)
Unfortunately, people often fall back to name-calling and fight-picking. The world is rife with examples from business and politics on this. I’m afraid I’ve also done it myself at times. I’ve found that a little drama and figurative speech sometimes helps to make myself more clear, but if there’s too much of it, it can escalate into hysteria. But the opposite, no drama and soul at all, would mean that you speak dryly like a robot and no one will understand or care what you say.
So it’s a delicate balancing act — making yourself be heard, but in a professional manner, listening to everyone involved and without resorting to hysteria or name-calling. And how to get it right is a perpetual learning act for everyone involved in public communications.
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