Skype denies that the outage is the result of an attack, but still failed both to demonstrate the lack of foundation for the attack announcement and clearly explain the reason that caused this sign-in problem. Standard Public Relation technique.
On ICT law, politics and other digital stuff
The fact of the matter is that Skype’s problems are nowhere near over, as far as many of us can tell. What is more disturbing is that they are not levelling with customers. They are acting exactly the same as an airline which holds passengers in a plane on the tarmac for many hours without food, water, fresh air…BUT with overflowing toilets and almost no credible information.
I have been a loyal user of Skype for almost three years, but they have to get their act together and deal honestly with subscribers. These “glass half full” postings they are giving are useless and frustrating. There are alternatives to Skype and if they can’t treat their subscribers well during this crisis (for them), they will kill their business. It is instructive that Skype has never allowed direct customer service comment via email, and is not allowing customers to react to their official blogs.
Get with it Skype, or we will move to your competitors soon. I’m willing to “hang in,” at least for a while, if you are honest and open. You need some people who are experienced in crisis management – or at least with some common sense.
I wish they could have broadcast an email telling users they had a problem. I ended up downloading the new version of Skype (3.5) and who knows if it’s defective. I also spent more than an hour trying to troubleshoot the problem before I realized it was in the backbone.
Another aspect of PR are pure numbers. A good network availability of 99.93% translates approximately to the maximum downtime of 365 minutes per year. Unfortunately we are close to the 99.0% point for Skype now which equals 3.65 days of downtime.
Sorry I forgot to add: as of 2pm New York time, Friday, I still can’t make calls to phones.