I don't want to defend Skype after the outage their login system faced last week (16-18.08.07), as they are doing it lots better than me, but I'm amazed by the quantity of critical and harsh reactions following this unforeseen interruption of service.

I have the impression that Skype critical voices are not so loud and mean when their local ISP, mobile  operator, telephone company, electricity or any other services they subscribe, including indispensable ones such lift, coffee machine, PS3 etc..

Skype outage was the first major glitch for the last 4 years which is more than excellent record in term of reliability. During that period how many time you have not been able to send SMS, pass a phone calls and even access the Internet either from home or at work ? 

In addition, Skype took the decision to compensate their paying customers (Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited,
SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers) by extending their subscription for 7 days in a goodwill gesture.

What I would propose is to spead the word among all Telco's and ISP (to start with) that automatic compensations are most welcome whenever they are not able to deliver the service we are paying for (perfect example of bad ISP behavior in Switzerland, video in French). 

Tags: 2007, access, arc, art, availability, blog, ces, compensation, customer, electricity, example, failure, google, GTalk, ia, im, internet, IT World, lan, live, login, MIT, mobile, nomadcom.net, outage, phone, press, reliability, sco, search, services, skype, sms, space, switzerland, term, video, web, wp, www

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 0:21 and is filed under Internet World, Nomad Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.