Only if you are not on a well-deserved holiday, then you certainly already know that the famous VoIP client and the instant messaging program Skype were unavailable for more than 36 hours for some of its users and close to 48 hours for others. The exact causes aren’t yet known and probably until the company headed by former founders of Kazaa gives an official and credible explanation for this unfortunate event, all what we know is pure speculation.

The anatomy of an outage

The first problems regarding Skype’s service outage were reported on Thursday and the company quickly acknowledged on its website that there is a problem.

"Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype," the company wrote on its support blog at about 2 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, or about 10 a.m. Eastern U.S. Daylight time, on Thursday. "Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.” it has been posted yesterday on the site.

In order to prevent other problems, Skype Team had disabled also downloads of the program.

Late yesterday, Skype was on its way back.

“We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day. An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.” said a post on Heartbeat Skype, the official blog.

Also the post signed by Villu Arak dismissed some of the theories about the possible causes which led to the outbreak.

“Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.” it’s been said on the blog.

In an earlier post Villu Arak blamed an algorithm for Skype’s outage. “This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.” he explained.

In a new notice, posted on August 18, Villu Arak announced that the outage is officially over and promised a detailed explanation on Monday . “Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal. On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order”, wrote Arak.

But who is Skype?

Skype, which is acquired by the auction site eBay, was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who are better known as the men behind Kaxaa. The program, which uses peer-to-peer technology to connect phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users, has became an instant hit after its launch in August 2003. Since it was acquired by eBay, the program added permanently new features such as Skype Find, Skype Prime, Send Money, which allows users to send money via PayPal from one Skype user to another. Skype has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the latest version 3.5 was launched earlier this month. According to the latest data, there are 220 millions Skype users and during a usual day there might be close to 5 or 6 million people connected at any given time.

Beyond the technical issues

Once the technical problems seem to have been solved, another problem for Skype takes shape: in what way this situation will affect its credibility? Debate on this subject has already heated spirits all over the Internet.

The users’ reactions went from indifference to frustration, influenced of course, by each one’s degree of involvement with the popular VoIP client.

Unpleasantly impressed by what is going on with Skype, some have introduced the assumption that Skype’s problems not only that will have negative consequences on the company, but also will constitute a drawback for the whole VoIp technology.

“I have no doubt that this outage will be a wakeup call for many users, small businesses and service providers. This outage showcases the vulnerability of VoIP overall, a young technology that wants to replace the good old phone. This outage can reach well beyond Skype, it can impact other services such as Microsoft's messengers, AOL's messengers and Yahoo's messenger as well”, wrote Rick C. Hodgin, for TGDaily.

On the other side of the barricade there are those who highlight that the situations in which the users’ communication is based exclusively on Skype are extremely rare and it is unlikely that the 220 million users should be that impressed by the service being unavailable.

“I think the fact that the Skype outage even stirred a buzz is a testament to the success of the application. And I find it really hard to believe that some 220 million folks are going to delete the Skype application from their desktops just because of one service outage.” said Marguerite Reardon on CNet News Blog.

In my opinion, like always the truth is somewhere in the middle. It goes without saying that there will be thousands or dozens of thousands users and customers that will decide that Skype is not reliable anymore for their ways of communicating and will try to replace it with other applications or solutions.

But with the exemption of Skype there aren’t so many free applications left to ensure the quality provided by Skype and to sustain all the options it proposes. There is no debate that there are some other programs like Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger or even GTalk to replace it, but in their cases the voice call options are more like complementary options to messaging and not vice versa, as is the case of Skype. However, it is more likely that the rhythm of adopting Skype will be slowed down, until this crisis is forgotten.

Also I don’t think that the Skype’s problem will be a blow for VoIP technology. To rule out a technology just because a particular application had some problems, it’s way to extreme.

On the other side, I agree that the strike Skype received will be faster forgotten if it’s not followed by further problems. Another crisis in less than a few months will irremediably affect Skype’s credibility.

I hope that, for their own good, the engineers that work to solve this problem are trying not only to “patch” the system to make it fully functional as quickly as possible, but they are trying to search and eliminate all the others points of failure.

For the moment let’s forgive the guys from Skype and not forget that they are still doing a wonderful job.