Good Morning Silicon Valley

Internet telephony pioneer Skype continued its crawl back to recovery today after leaving millions of users out of touch for more than 24 hours (see “You fool, I said we wanted to see more SkypeOut headlines“). Trying to tamp down rumors, Skype said the outage had nothing to do with Wednesday’s maintenance work on its Web-based payment services nor any sort of cyber attack. “This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software,” according to the company blog. “This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.”

But as Larry Dignan says, “Whether Skype’s outage was due to an exploit or an algorithm doesn’t really matter. What matters is there were small businesses that actually depended on Skype and were let down. I’d certainly think twice before relying on Skype.” Adds Michael Krigsman, “Large-scale business adoption of Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure applications, such as Skype, will only occur when these new technologies can survive comparison with established utilities. Society has demanded that basic services — water, phone, electricity, roads, and so on — must adhere to certain levels of reliability and availability. Likewise, business users expect their software infrastructure to provide high reliability, especially in mission-critical domains.”

Russell Shaw, however, doesn’t see any long-term repercussions for Skype. “One thing about consumers across various sectors. Low-cost often equals lower expectations,” he writes. “In most cases, I expect the lower expectations factor to enable consumers and very small businesses (accounting and legal offices, for instance) to quickly forget about this blip.” But not too quickly, judging by the pain flowing onto to the message boards from disenfranchised users.