Skype's official explanation smells off…

I'm back from 10 days on the road with my family. A classic road trip, covering over 4200 kilometers, with 50 hours behind the wheel, we saw a lot and did a lot. And, it turns out, in rural New Brunswick, there's not much in the way of Internet, or even cell phone access. That's OK. It was a much needed break.

There are a lot of things to catch up on, but one that has been niggling in the back of my mind for the last two weeks has been the Skype outage. Skype says that their login servers were overwhelmed after Microsoft pushed an update to Windows users. That just doesn't smell right.

What about all the Macintosh users who didn't get the Windows update? How come Skype was down for them too? Surely they should have just kept right on Skyping, right? Isn't that what peer to peer is all about?
Coun't Skype just… add more login servers? That's what iLike did when they encountered capacity related outages during their launch on Facebook. With the resources of EBay behind them, couldn't Skype have managed this?

Something smells rotten in the state of Estonia.

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.