Skype down again as Microsoft fumbles with operations
Recently Microsoft acquired Skype for no less than $8.5 billion, in an attempt to boost its position in the enterprise collaboration market, leveraging Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities. Additionally it will help to compete against Apple’s FaceTime and Google’ Voice offerings.
Although the ink on the contracts has barely dried up, Microsoft is very eager to take over day-to-day operations, sources at Skype report. On May 26, the company suffered a partial outage. Although Skype management didn’t want to admit it, it had everything to do with Microsoft’s takeover.
In an email conversion with the IT Reporter, Skype CEO Tony Bates was willing to reveal the actual cause. “Steve Ballmer told me to keep a lid on it, but the outage on May 26 was definitely not our fault. Steve told me some Microsoft sysadmins would do some “preparations”, but they totally messed things up. I heard it was because they didn’t like the brand of our servers and the network cable colors were all wrong. Unbelievable. I had a animal control firm capture them.”
For today’s outage, the press was told that it was caused by “configuration issues“, but Mr. Bates knows all too well it’s not his company’s fault. Wrote Bates: “It’s just madness. We had everything running smoothly on Redhat Linux servers, but this morning a big Microsoft truck pulled up at the datacenter. Bill Gates came out with a big smile. “Tony”, he said, “I’m here to help. Let me roll in these sweet Windows Servers”. He brought a whole bunch of interns too, real creepy folks with ‘Resistence is Futile’ t-shirts. I was even too scared to ask security. Well, I guess you can understand why Skype went down again.”
For now, Skype has been restored to normal service, but the future remains uncertain, as Mr. Ballmer has arranged for his 19 year old nephew to take over as Chief Technological Officer for Skype next month.
