Skype Continues to Choke

IanFogg | August 17, 2007, 03:52 PM

The new Skype is still struggling to take a breath, any breath, let alone "Take a deep breath" (current tagline).

[I've never been especially convinced by, "Take a deep breath", and I don't buy the justification. I much preferred the original: "The whole world can talk for free". In English, "Take a deep breath" sounds too much like preparation prior to doing something extremely risky. This is hardly the best impression to create during an outage. Skype tip: post-outage will be a great time to change the tagline. ]

Although a fix has yet to arrive, at least for me, the company is doing an exemplary job of communicating progress. Skype have again updated their website's front page and they've posted ongoing updates in the Skype Heartbeat blog.

Yesterday, when Skype performance was at its worst, I found Skype-in successfully sent incoming calls to voicemail. A test message that I left was delivered to my PC two hours later during a brief period when my PC's Skype software managed to log-in to the network. Not great, but this is better than no service.

Skype has now taken more than the 24 hours that they estimated it would take to fix the network. The longer this goes on, and the more promises that Skype breaks, the more trust in Skype will fall and the worse the long term damage. If Skype aspires to re-gain trust quickly, expect some customer confidence building incentives once the network returns to normal.