Friday, August 17, 2007

Skype Network is Down

Skype network has been unstable for the past day or two.

It does seem to be getting better. I was not able to sign-in few hours ago, but when I tried now, I was able to. Skype said they disabled Skype downloads, but that seems to be back and available as well.

Not really sure what they mean by "it's a software issue". Obviously, they did not push updates to fix the problem. Since Skype is a P2P network, maybe this incident indicates that the P2P structure has its limits.

I am a Skype user using SkypeOut and SkypeIn along with it. Although, I just recently started using Gizmo project and GrandCentral as well. No product is perfect, and I thought it would be wiser to not limit myself to one particular solution. Maybe I was right, for this Skype outage really did not impact me since I was able to use Gizmo and GrandCentral to make calls. (I do not have a land line.)

Skype has its strength, and so does others. This incident may drive some population of the Skype users to switch to other networks or encourage them to have an alternate solution. Maybe even back to a land line. I won't though...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Update: My Skype is not available at the moment. It seems like it's going on and off and worse than last night. The daytime traffic maybe causing this in the US. According to Skype, this is not result of an attack or maintenance. But that scares me more as what are they or can they do to fix it, or is the P2P structure itself at crisis? — Skype Official Heartbeat Blog (1100 GMT)

Unknown said...

I've posted my thoughts on GrandCentral and Gizmo which allows free SkypeIn + SkypeOut equivalent feature in the U.S. I'm using it, and I am very satisfied. I do like Skype, but combining with existing legacy phones that is still around an in use in the real world, I can't help it but to use this new method. — Free SkypeIn + SkypeOut Equivalent