Lesson to be learnt from Skype’s outage!

Many unfortunate users are effected from the Skype’s outage and there are few things which we can learn from this and ensure that we don’t effect our business by completely depending on one technology.

Although, Skype team has done a great job by keeping the users informed about the status of the service in their blog and so at least, it gives a bit of relief to everyone that things will be sorted out pretty quickly, but is that good enough if you are losing business ? I guess the answer will be NO and it is proved by the comments you see in that post too. I know many people who use Skype all the time and it is their main source of communication and with the help of SkypeIN service, I’m sure that they must be feeling pretty handicapped at this moment. The only thing I can say is that Never depend on one technology.

There are other services available which provide the similar kind of service (SkypeIN type) and I think one can always use others too. If you need two three IN numbers then I’ll suggest keeping at least 1 number with other services too. Yahoo offers such a service and with a great track record of no downtime at all, you’ve got every reason to believe this service. Gizmo Project offers such kind of service and it can be used as an alternative too.

Always have a backup plan and I think I should give this tip to Skype people instead of you, but still one needs a backup plan. While Skype was down, I made pretty good use of Google Talk and had no problems in communicating with people, so you may always keep your contacts handy in other networks too.

What do you think about such an outage and that with such a big company and on a network, which is one of the biggest and the one which is used by millions of people ?