11am Saturday and Skype's still a total mess

Following on from last night’s Skype coverage I reckoned everything should be functioning today. That’s just past 11am on Saturday now.

I’m pleased to see that Skype’s heartbeat system thinks everything is working. It’s not.

I won’t bore you with yet another ‘quote and comment’ piece from Skype’s inane updates. Allow me just one:

Link: Update at midnight GMT – Heartbeat

We’ve commandeered extra supplies of pizza and coffee, and we can promise that the Skype people aren’t going anywhere until they’re happy that everything is back to normal.

You do have to laugh. Otherwise, the alternative is just bad for your heart rate.

You’ve COMMANDEERED extra supplies of pizza and coffee?

What, that’s what’s going to fix your systems, is it?

I really, really dislike how Skype, via this kind of messaging, are massively downplaying the significance of this outage.

It’s certainly been eye-opening; a super illustration as to how Skype management wish to portray themselves in today’s marketplace.

They’re jokey, they’re matey, they’re ‘sorry for the inconvenience’.

They truly are still running around with a dotcom, startup, ‘it’s a freebie service so really, why should our customers care?’ attitude. When they should be playing in the same leagues as an international telecommunications firm.

Ridiculous.

Anyway, it’s still not working. They’ll, no doubt, get it fixed. But telling your customers that you’re busy eating pizza and drinking coffee — as IF that’s your only solution — ain’t the way ahead.

Tell me you’ve got five teams of shit hot Sun engineers on site in three different locations sweeping through your code. Tell me that you’ve got 500 people in 6 continents on the problem. Show me updates from your Direction Team every 30 minutes. Don’t tell me you’re busy eating pizza. If you’re going to go along those lines, why not tell me what sort of jokes your team are telling? Maybe you could give us an example of some of the music you’re all listening to while you don’t-fix the service? Could you give us an indication of a favourite The Onion article that you’ve all emailed round the office? Maybe also, could you comment on where you got the pizzas from, you know, keep us up to date on how many Hawaiians you’ve had? That would be swell, while we, your customers, get busy downloading SIPhone.