Skype crash has us asking again: Should a VoIP service targeting business go down?

Over the last week we've been debating what we can do about VoIP outages and whether a service trying to push itself as a business play can afford to have downtime. Just when we'd thought we'd put the uncomfortable subject to rest for the year, Skype crashes!

At about 4:00 PM yesterday, service started going back to normal for users, but throughout the day Skype users experienced an outage so widespread that when they all went on to Twitter to complain, they crashed that too!

According to Skype the problem originated among its supernodes, many of which were "taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype." Skype's blog explained that their "engineers are creating new 'mega-supernodes' as fast as they can" and referred visitors back to Twitter for status updates.

Failure of the supernodes is a pretty critical issue, notes Charles Studt, Vice President of Product Marketing at IntelePeer, a cloud communications provider. "In any modern IP communications network, that centralized directory function is pretty important obviously for being able to manage essentially, where are the end points located or what routes should I take to find them for a given process flow," he told Samantha Bookman over at our sister publication FierceTelecom.

Any Skype for Business users out there? How was your business day yesterday?

For more read the extensive coverage over at FierceTelecom.