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by Nicholas Aaron Khoo, Singapore

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When 8.6 million lost their voices

Aug 22, 2007 23:38

Skype went out, for two whole days! And 8.6 million lives were affected, among them many small businesses.

I know of people whose lives literally stopped when they lost their mobile phones, with some even entertaining suicidal thoughts.

While there's no precedence of anyone "losing their Skype" before, I guess this is the closest we can get in the case of millions losing an important means of communication all at once.

What a catastrophe!

In case you still have not heard about it, after two days of silence, Skype came out and explained the reason for the outage. Millions of Microsoft users rebooting their computers simultaneously for automatic patch updates! Murphy strikes again!

But this was definitely a serious blow to Skype's already declining usage base.

Besides the millions of affected consumers, many businesses actually depend on Skype for their operations. I know when I was developing Geek Terminal's tech strategy, we used to depend on Skype daily for our meetings as our directors were often in at least three to four different cities at any one time.

There are businesses which use Skype to generate revenues as well--personally hearing of a new startup in the works. Guess they have to reconsider their business model now!

Before we start flaming Skype or even Microsoft, in another issue just as recently, Google abruptly closed its online video store with a poorly managed refund policy which caused a huge outrage. Overall, this does not bode well for the growth of new online social media and Web 2.0, especially when there's been so much push for businesses to start using Web 2.0 and online social media.

Reliability of service is a huge issue for business users. In some of the contracts I've handled before, water-tight Service Level Agreements (SLAs) need to guarantee at least 99.7 percent uptime! That is something new online social media businesses and Web 2.0 providers need to consider if they want to provide their services to corporates.

Ending on a more positive note, Skype did get back its users after the two-day blackout :)

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Precious

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Precious says...
The Skype outage showed how risky it is to be reliant on only one communication provider.

Some third-world countries purposely disallow competition so that there is only one monopolitic telecommunications provider. When the provider suffer an outage, it is chaos for the whole nation.

Aug 23, 2007 00:53

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RezaHashemi

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RezaHashemi says...
Hi Nicholas, We didn't feel any skype earthquake here in Tehran :)

Aug 24, 2007 00:30

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About Nicholas Aaron Khoo

Nicknamed "Gadget Boy" by friends at age 18 because he used to scribble Grafitti on a PalmPilot faster than most would type, Nicholas Aaron Khoo is web developer turned technopreneur and Singapore tech blogger who also pretends to do strategic advisory for tech startups and 'un'Fortune 500s (when he's not pretending to be the gadget-loaded Batman). A digital nomad, his tech interests range from gadgets, games, tech trends, social media, security, and just about anything that runs on 1s and 0s. See his industry affiliations here.
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