Skype Troubles Remain For Some, Service Currently Being Restored "In A Controlled Manner"

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As many have likely heard, or experienced personally, Skype went down yesterday and still remains offline for many users as of this posting. Sure, this is a fairly big deal for those who depend on the service, however there could potentially be a positive outcome.

First and foremost, according to a recent report on GigaOm, at present “16.5 million of 25 million concurrent users are back online.” The numbers are coming by way of Tony Bates who is the CEO of Skype and perhaps a little more important than the current status because lets face it, your Skype either works or it doesn’t, is the possible lesson that has been learned.

Before we get to that though, other reports of restoration include that users in Europe and the East Coast of the US are now “fully restored” and the “IM, Video and Audio services are back-up.” And with the good news comes a little bit of bad. It seems that the Group Video services and offline IM capabilities are going to remain down and were described as “not going to be working for sometime.”

Switching back to something positive, or at least as little more upbeat anyway. Tony Bates went on to state that he is “sorry it happened and we are going to be issuing formal compensation to people.” Furthermore, while some will always question the sincerity of an apology, there is the lesson to be learned and for Bates that is how “this outage if anything has made it even more clear how reliant people are on the service.”

With that, look for that apology to arrive sometime later today. Bottom line here, while it is nice to see that Skype is taking this to heart and will hopefully make some improvements, it does show just how fragile things can be. After all, many depend on Skype at this point as part of their daily business communication. It also makes you consider just how important it can be to have a back up plan, just in case.