When a Telco Goes Dark
Ok, there isn't a lot of precedent here. I can think of one major telecommunications interruption in my liftetime - The Hinsdale fire on Mother's Day in 1998. A fire caused a catastrophic outage in an Illinois Bell central office that took the phone service out in a large degree. Obviously local service was disrupted, but the building was a vital hub for long distance services as well.
More recently, there was a huge power outage in the mideast that took a lot of things out of service, but notably not the telecom systems or the Internet. They both routed calls around the problem area without much of a hitch.
I'm not alone in my observations over the past year that Skype has been turning into a telco. So what happens when a telco goes dark?
Here's the news as of this moment on Skype -
UPDATED 16 August, 2007 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype. 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. Latest updatesSo if your telco or wireless carrier say Verizon, Qwest, T-Mobile. AT&T, went dark for no explanation other than the preceding, what would you do?
Sadly the hardest hit are most likely the third party businesses that leverage Skype as a key part of their business. But it begs a telling question for people who like the calls for free aspect of Skype. How do you feel now that you're getting your money's worth?
I for one, am pretty unimpressed by the quality of information. I'll be blunt. "it's a software issue" can't mean too many things. It can me we failed to patch for a vulnerability and a malicious exploit bit us. It can mean that proper quality controls weren't in place and something was deployed prematurely, without adequate testing. It can mean reliance on an operating system that failed in some way.
No matter how you slice it, "a software issue" clearly means someone, somewhere failed to provide due dilegence. There is no way around that.
It does give pause to think about service sustainability and survivability.
Technorati Tags: Skype, service outage
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