Skype experiences growing pains

A major outage at peer-to-peer VoIP service provider Skype yesterday is indicative of the firm’s current growing pains, according to analyst firm Ovum.

The technical problems, which first emerged yesterday, are continuing to dog the company's service with users logging onto Skype’s website earlier today encountering the message: "Skype is currently working on resolving the sign-on issue. We’re fixing our networking software and monitoring the clients getting online with increased success."

At the time of writing, Skype’s ‘Heartbeat Blog’ also reported problems with ‘Sign in and registration’, and with its ‘peer-to-peer network core’.

Ovum senior analyst Mark Main said that the latest Skype outage appears to follow several months of lower profile technical problems. "Numerous people have remarked to me that 'Skype is getting worse'," he said. "The difficulty analysing such problems is that all the evidence is anecdotal and certainly not based on a good statistical sample."

However, Main added that there is the danger that the Skype service, which has proved so disruptive to normal telco business models, may have been " developed without sufficient regard for resilience".

"Skype will need to work hard to make this outage event a one-off or its loyal user base could be enticed away by other, better VoIP offerings," he warned. "There is plenty of choice.”