Comms: Skype gets blue screen of death

This user rebooted his PC (twice), restarted Skype (three times), disconnected and reconnected his internet connection (twice, despite other programs working just fine) all because the error message within Skype says that the user is not connected and should reset his connection.

For a communications company, upon which millions, including businesses rely for their non-emergency communications, to have to resort to using a rival platform to get out the message that the fault is with its own tech is pretty sad.

After a while, Skype posted another Twitter comment saying it had found the cause of the problem and was addressing it.

But not before the wags on Twitter had begun to have their way with the fact that this outage arose shortly after Microsoft bought the company.

Of course, the fact that MS owns it has nothing to do with the break: MS hasn't actually completed the purchase yet (so far as we know) and it certainly hasn't started tampering with the service: it's not even got a Microsoft logo on it.

Of course, Skype's first stab ("a small number of you might have noticed....") was laughed out of court: there is no such thing as a small number of Skype users. And to each of them, they are the only customer that matters. When it ran out of a shed and was fun for geeks, geeks accepted that sometimes things go wrong. But now it's totally mainstream and things going wrong are not accepted by Joe Public.

After all, Skype may think that (for example) a million users is a small percentage. But for a business whose sales team relies on Skype for international calls, it's a 100% failure in its comms.

But, like one of those notices in a shop door window (out to lunch, back in an hour), Skype's "Heartbeat" page where it posts service announcements says it should be fixed in "an hour or so." But it doesn't give a time when that hour started.

Clearly being a communications company doesn't mean that its staff have an ability to communicate effectively.