Skype bug affects users worldwide

Skype users across the globe were affected today by a systems crash that left many unable to sign in to their accounts.

The incident comes just weeks after software giant Microsoft announced it was buying Skype for an eye-popping £5.2bn, with the intention of driving up business use of the service.

So could the recent outage harm Skype’s prospects in the enterprise?

The number of businesses currently using Skype is believed to be relatively small, although numbers are hard to get hold of.

In 2010, Skype filed an IPO registration document with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which stated that in a survey of its users, 37 per cent said they had used the service for business purposes. Given its total user base at the time of 124 million, that would mean an awful lot of people using Skype for business.

But those figures include businesses that use the service very occasionally, rather than millions of business users.

“A lot of the Skype usage in large enterprises can be considered unofficial – IT turns a blind eye to it because it is seen as something useful,” said Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at research group Quocirca.

Consequently, the outage suffered by Skype is unlikely to damage its reputation, he adds: “It is not seen as critical [to business], so it’s not expected to have the resilience of a full-blown enterprise voice-over-IP telephony system.”

Nevertheless, such incidents underline the risks of moving to cloud-based services, warned Bamforth.

“They can look like an attractive way to cut costs in the short term, but when you're talking about an enterprise-scale deployment, you need to think about quality of service, business continuity and support,” he added.

Skype has subsequently issued instructions for users affected by the bug, which involve deleting the shared.xml file.