Shut Up!

I repeat what i said yesterday: i think the explanation after the outage was quite OK. And they provided some more clarifications today!

But, why did Skype communicate so badly during the crisis? Almost no concrete information, apart from the usual “we are doing all we can”, and “it isn’t a hacker”! Niklas Zennström … who is this? Never heard of him … during the outage hurricane!

Some Skype Beta Testers have a blog, and don’t hide they are Beta Testers: not any one of them commented on the outage! Not a word. Not even after the recovery! Very unusual! The only comment was from Tamas Henning “Nope! Sorry guys, there is nothing here”. But wander with your mouse over the link here, it says: “Overwhelmed or the inevitable has finally come?”. Another Beta Tester posted something, then removed it! I was however too late to read it!

Were they told to “shut up”? Probably, but this looks like good old style communist or dictatorial practices!

Jaanus Kase, the former main blogger and communication man of Skype, commented however, and he showed clearly his disagreement with the Skype communication policy DURING the outage: the right thing to do would be to have an ongoing public incident report and debriefing of what’s going on. … Skype should do (this) if it still wants to be an open friendly company!

We can’t say Skype didn’t communicate at all of course! Villu Arak and some others kept the public informed, but in a very cleaned up language.

I think that next time they should improve their crisis communication!

[EDITED] Tamas Henning made a comment on his blog, after this post!