Skype Announces SkypeOutage Limited-Calling Plan

What’s most surprising about today’s Skype outage is not its 12- to 24-hour duration, but the fact that it’s the first such outage we’ve seen in years. In its relatively brief history, Skype has rarely gone offline. The service’s last reported outage occurred in October 2005.

So while today’s event is certainly annoying for fans of the widely used VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) service, it’s likely not indicative of some lurking infrastructure problem. “This is the most significant outage for the service in years, yet we already foresee scores of headlines trumpeting the flaws of VOIP communications based on this outage alone,” writes Ken Fisher at Ars Technica. “That’s unfortunate because we think Skype network performance has been spectacular on average, given that it’s free and heavily used. In fact, it would appear that the Skype P2P network is indeed in fine shape, it’s just that the authentication system (which authenticates but also provides location services for routing purposes) is hosed.”