Skype’s long outage is creating waves in the internet. Even the stocks of Ebay has taken a hit, though it is not clear if it is directly related to Skype’s problems. This raises a very important question regarding viability of Skype to replace your business phone line. I do agree that even the traditional phone line can get outages. But, in the case of Skype, it is trying hard to bring in a paradigm shift among the consumers, trying to wean them to move from traditional phones to the VOIP system. Already the confidence of consumer on VOIP is very low with the patent problems of Vonage and sudden demise of Sun Rocket. Under such a scenario, this long outage doesn’t bode well for VOIP, in general, and Skype, in particular. Skype has its task cut out. It needs to explain the outage to customer’s satisfaction and make investments to ensure the reliability of the service so that the customer trust in the product builds in the future. The future success of Skype relies on how well they handle this outage. What do you think? Does this incident makes you feel comfortable/uncomfortable to replace your telephone line with Skype?

Update 1: Techdirt highlights that this outage reveals about a more centralized nature of Skype.

Update 2: Skype says that significant number of users could use it now. But I still couldn’t log into it yet. Om Malik says Skype’s loss is Gizmo Project’s gain.