Shattered Skype slowly staggers to its feet after 15-HOUR outage outrage Microsoft's Skype is slowly righting itself after spending most of the day offline. The video-and-voice call service fell over at about 0800 UTC (0100 PT), and was useless across the UK, the US, Europe, India, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere – pretty much worldwide, it seems. Now, some 15 hours later, it appears Skype is on …
Right. Not at all.
Skype for Business Ok : correct me as a non-user but this generates or supports revenue but the rest of Skype does not? And is their a reason why the one fell over and the other did not?
(Innocent and wide-eyed butter-wouldn't-melt enquiring gaze.....)
I believe Skype and Skype for Business are totally separate projects so I doubt it has anything to do with revenue and it's just sheer luck because they are on totally separate infrastructure.
Skype for Business is just a rebranded Lync which is just a rebranded office communicator. Very little has changed during those rebadges other than a few UI tweaks (at least as far as I can tell).
"I didn't get to talk to my kids last night. Probably not a big deal to you."
Well...you could have used a phone to speak to them, but for some reason chose not to. You don't think the call to your kids is worth the cost of the call? Then it's probably not a big deal to you either.
> Well...you could have used a phone to speak to them, but for some reason chose not to
A speech-delayed toddler and a 6 month-old baby don't deal too well with phones. I use Skype because of the video chat. As it happens, I did choose to use a phone after Skype repeatedly failed. Not a resounding success.
I'd happily pay the price of a phone call to get that video chat so they can see me and can respond in their preferred ways. As it was, I got "Hiyaaaaaa! burble burble burble Bye!"
But thanks for telling me my kids aren't a big deal to me.
I think it goes to show that the area of the Venn diagram containing techies that have managed to reproduce is still surprisingly small.
Video calling would have been a godsend when my kids were pre-schoolers. Sadly yet another thing for which I seem to have been born a decade or so too early.
Skype is a good choice for an IM if you want to have decoupled work and private identities.
Such a separation of work life and private life is practically impossible with GoogleTalk as Google continues to do anything and everything in its power to throw a spanner in the works at any attempt to have multiple per-user accounts or identities.
Other IM systems are nearly extinct or purely internal.
Unfortunately corporate IT is utterly inept at running XMPP (regardless of which software is used). With the exemption of Cisco themselves, most cannot spin up an instance and keep it up and nearly everyone prohibits server-to-server which is the greatest thing about XMPP.
The ones that can, keep it internal blocking s2s, which defeats the purpose of the exercise. Quite funny actually, as any end-user can run a jabber IM (all it takes is a debian box, even a measly RasPi can do it). For example I do and I know quite a few people who do it as well so you can now IM them at TheirName@Theirdoman.com same as you email them.
So this leaves skype as one of the few viable choices if you want to IM to people outside your company.
Really?
Tencent might be as big as Facebook.
They do have QQ International, an English version client of QQ
It does all that Skype does and more and better. QQ even lets you open multiple copies of client with different identities at the same time!
However I can't get it to run on Linux, either the Chinese Native interface, nor the English version on Wine. But I've seen it running on Android (in English) and Windows Phone, though those versions lack many features in the Windows desktop version. You can even turn off the adverts.
Skype seems to have a tendency to use 90% + CPU on some netbooks/notebooks, though this may be related to camera, Ironically the MS Linux Skype version is fine on same machine and has no adverts!
Modern cell phones can do text messaging, voice calls, and they're starting to get video chat. My cell provider does cheaper International calls for $10/month. My landline is toll-free to much of the world and has better rates than Skype when there's a fee. Best of all, none of the non-Skype solutions will seize your account balance due to "fraud" when you make a call from a foreign country.
Apart from there being a half dozen p-t-p alternatives to skype, there are also SIP providers for voice calls.
I really don't see this as a major event. Failure to plan for problems on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
MS will be feeling the pain (and skype still seems to be staggering today) but if you don't have alternates set up then you don't understand that "things fail"
Well, you're the auld dinosaure, ain't ya?
I'm supposed to text or email the dozens of people I communicate wtih regularly just to see if they're about and something important, rather than the easy ping that Skype supplies?
Or I use a different IM and convince hundreds of contacts that they should join a new service?
Let me guess, Google+? or a more stable Tinder based on AWS service? (oops)
>>"Apart from there being a half dozen p-t-p alternatives to skype, there are also SIP providers for voice calls."
Yes, talking someone through setting up a PTP alternative to Skype in a foreign country at short notice via email is something very easy to do. Or is it your contention that I should proactively do this with everyone I might talk to abroad in advance and they should maintain this in case I need to call them by it?
>>"I really don't see this as a major event. Failure to plan for problems on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine."
Where did I say it did? How on earth do you think that you are relevant to this situation? Ego much?
>>"MS will be feeling the pain (and skype still seems to be staggering today) but if you don't have alternates set up then you don't understand that "things fail""
What I understand that it is neither possible nor cost-effective to actively prepare for every conceivable thing that can go wrong in this world. You have a very patronizing attitude for someone who brings so little utility to the conversation. I get that you may want to prop up your self-esteem by criticising others on the Internet, but I feel obliged to deflate this particular attempt as you've decided to pick on me for your target, by pointing out what a sad individual needs to do this.
Ummm, I have to say that Firefox's 'Hello' works fine on my Mint setup, no tweaking required, but if it really doesn't work for you you could try TOX, which does require a bit of setting up of a front end (Venom worked for me).
is that Skype wasn't actually down for 15 hours. I had a spinning status icon - which usually signifies that you aren't logged in - and everybody was showing as being offline. But at the same time I could send messages, and they would be delivered - providing the other person had Skype open.
Admittedly, in many cases if nobody can see that you are online, and you can't see other people are online, it might as well be completely down. But the reality was at least the messaging (I didn't try calls) was working, despite the problems with statuses.
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