Skype Goes Down

First Facebook, now this?  You've GOT to be kidding me.  This is just getting ridiculous.

Skype is a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) client that we use on a daily basis at my job.  It's not that we need it.  It just makes our job easier because with Skype we can message anyone about anything we are doing without having to worry about emails (since hardly anyone actually checks their emails here), or having to get up and go bug them about it.  It's a simple communication tool that makes it so we can communicate without having to disrupt what someone else is doing, or having to wait until they get back to their desks if they're away for a moment.  Not to mention just getting up and walking around takes our focus off what we are working on.

I have plenty I can be working on.  Believe me on that one.  However, there are a lot of things I need to communicate with other people about to get them done.  I can't do that if Skype is down.  I can, but that turns a 10 minute task into a 30 minute to an hour task.  It's a pain in the butt, to say the least.

Skype was just starting to hit it big with big corporations, however, if I were running a big corporation and I found that our communication tool went down, even once for a few minutes, I would be looking for something else to use.

Skype has yet to send any information about the outage, and they haven't even bothered to mention it other than a small Twitter message:  “Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations.”  No, I do not use Twitter (nor do I EVER intend to).  I got this information from another online source.  This is all that has been said about it.  There are several blogs and articles online, but nothing from Skype themselves.  If they can't even keep their users informed when there is a problem, is this really a service you can trust?  According to one article, "The number of users online has continued to drop, as just over 10 million users are on the service now."  That's an insane number of people.  I can't believe such a trusted service has gone down like this, and my hope is that Skype either picks up again, or they at least release a statement about what is happening.

In all this hubbub, I am faced with the question of how many services out there really are trusted?  Or rather, really should be trusted.  What's next, Twitter?  Can you imagine the millions of users staring at their computer screens unsure of who they're going to tell about that crazy bowel movement they had this morning?  It's pure insanity.

Mark my words, this is the beginning of the technological apocalypse!