Saturday, August 18, 2007

Mission Critical Mission

One of the revolutions in the area of communication in last 2-3 years, in my opinion, has been Skype. An absolutely unique mode of communication, using the grossly slandered peer-to-peer method of connectivity in a legal mode, skype revolutionized use of voice data over the internet. They got bought for $2.6 billion by ebay, quite a steep amount. Skype continued to do well and slowly became a mission critical application, whose breakdown would result in productivity and money loss.

On 16th Aug 2007, Skype suffered its first major outage. Skype acknowledged it too and promised to get the service back online within 24 hours. The promised time went by and the service was not back. I use skype regularly and definitely felt the productivity loss because of this outage. Now, when you have set such a great precedent and when people have started trusting your service implicitly, such an outage sure puts you in trouble. And as a direct consequence, the parent company, Ebay lost $1 billion in market share!

So many years of trouble free service and a couple of days of trouble, and what a huge price the trouble came with! Live on, in the world of the demanding!

No comments: