Skype crashes, eBay forced to eat its own dog food

Skype, the pop­u­lar peer-to-peer VoIP ser­vice owned by eBay, was unavail­able yes­ter­day. Long-standing errors in Skype’s client soft­ware shut down the company’s supern­odes, which took down the entire ser­vice. See this New York Times arti­cle for more background.

Con­ve­nience is all about timing

eWeek reported today that Skype is slowly com­ing back up, but mil­lions of users are still unable to access the service.

Skype is releas­ing sit­u­a­tion reports on its blog – here is the most recent post.

eBay had moved its North Amer­i­can office tele­phones from land­lines to Skype, which didn’t help mat­ters much yes­ter­day. I dis­cussed some of the busi­ness rea­sons behind this deci­sion on Decem­ber 13.

For eBay and many small com­pa­nies that had based their telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy in Skype, yes­ter­day was a bit­ter les­son about redun­dant sys­tems and failover. As two ana­lysts noted in the eWeek arti­cle, Skype is not a land­line replace­ment. The Finan­cial Times pointed out today that dis­ap­pointed Skype users may go back to less con­ve­nient, more reli­able options.

Reli­a­bil­ity is valuable

Sys­tems will fail. Skype had four years to fix the prob­lem that emerged yes­ter­day. At Los Ange­les Inter­na­tional Air­port last week­end, 20,000 pas­sen­gers were stranded when a sin­gle net­work inter­face card (NIC) on a work­sta­tion caused a major LAX net­work to crash within 70 min­utes. See SlashGear, CrunchGear and Con­sumerist for more details.

Blog­gers includ­ing Mark Evans and Allen Stern dis­cussed one inter­est­ing reswult of the out­age – it really does appear that Skype matters.

Tagged as: airport, California, computer, eBay, hardware, Internet, network, Skype, software, telecom, VoIP