Download Squad

After about two days of problems, Skype is back to normal. Skype's Villu Arak promises to post a more detailed explanation of exactly what went wrong and how it was fixed on Skype's blog Monday.

Incidentally, as Skype Journal points out, there's a new Skype build available for download, although the update has nothing to do with the outage and just offers a few bug fixes.

The outage has raised an important question. Can are customers really able to place their trust relatively new technologies like Skype and VoIP in general? A number of individuals and small businesses have eliminated their traditional telephone lines, replacing them with low-cost SkypeIn and SkypeOut accounts, although we'd venture to guess most people still have a cellphone as a backup.

It's not like old fashioned telcos never have outages, but two days is a long time to be without connectivity. During that time, a number of alternate VoIP services took advantage of the situation, promoting their technologies as resistant to Skype-type outages. That's because Skype's service wasn't actually affected. It was the authentication process that failed, preventing most Skype users from logging in. If you have a peer to peer VoIP service without a centralized authorization server, you're theoretically outage-proof. Theoretically.