May 1st, less Skypers

May 1st was in quite a lot of countries a Holiday (Celebration of the Working Class, or Workers Day, or Labour Day, or whatever). My Dutch neighbours do not seem to have a working class, because they don’t celebrate it!

For people who know my number analysis this will of course not be a surprise, but when major countries have a day off (and on May 1st it were several major countries), the number of concurrent users online goes down compared to other days. The same is valid for Saturday and Sunday, see the red curve on the graph below, taken from the Japanese site nyanyan.to.

When you look closely at the Friday before the weekend, the number of online users is also lower than on Thursday, probably because some Muslim countries have their weekend.

Strange also: it seems the download servers for the Skype client were down for a 48 hours period mainly over the weekend, see the flat portion of the blue curve above.