Skype is down – Are there Alternatives? Yes!

Well, there has been an overwhelming interest in my last post about Skype being down. So I thought I would do a little research for people into what alternatives there were. Gizmo seems to be the big competitor and is highly regarded. Here is a great article by ZDNet on Skype vs. Gizmo and the comments are equally interesting. Here is a list of some popular voip providers with a little bit about each one. And here is a much more in-depth comparison of Skype to Gizmo called Crowning the King of Free Talk-Skype vs Gizmo. And here is a list from C/Net Download.com of bunch of net phones, sorted by user rating (although it is confusing because the rating and number of users don’t seem to match when you go to detail of each – maybe best to sort by editor rating?).

And of course, let’s not forget the wikipedia entries for Gizmo Project and Skype and a very comprehensive entry on Comparison of Voip Software (I’d only check out the ones with links, there are a million of them on here).

That is a lot of information, but for even more, you can search on “free internet skype gizmo reviews” and get a ton of information about Skype, Gizmo Project and other VOIP software.

If you are here because Skype is down, I’d check out Gizmo Project. It sounds easy and good and of course, free. And if you are just trying to figure out what to use, these reviews and information should help. At one time I would have said Skype, hands down. I still really like Skype, but I can’t say I feel it is the only game in town anymore.

Here is a link to the original post from Skype. And again, you can go here for updates from Skype on the situation. This is their latest communication:

“Hello everyone,

Apologies for the delay, but we can now update you on the Skype sign-on issue. As we continue to work hard at resolving the problem, we wanted to dispel some of the concerns that you may have. The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.

Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible.

(Updated at 10pm GMT)”

~Susan Mellott

Skype Problems! Many users unable to log in or make calls

We had a big thunderstorm/tornado warning last night and lost power several times so I disconnected my computer.  When I reconnected it this morning (and reset a couple of power strips), everything was fine except Skype would not connect.  I wondered what was going on, but was just happy to be all up and running except for that so I just let it go and kept waiting for it to connect.

Then I started reading all my “My Yahoo” feeds and I have one for Skype and saw that there were big problems with Skype.  Here is an Associated Press article about it from Germany.

Infoword said in its article that “The problem appears to be affecting users particularly in Europe, according to blog postings.  Users in the U.S. don’t seem to be having problems.”.  I’m afraid they are mistaken, because I can tell you this U.S. user is having a problem!
According to the Skype blog post called Problems with Skype Login, dated August 16 (today):
“UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.”

And if you read the Skype blog post from yesterday Aug 15,  they had planned to do maintenance and some services would be unable yesterday and then they added an update: “The planned maintenance was completed at 15.08.2007 7:10 GMT and now all systems work normally again.”  Oops! maybe not…

Skype is courting businesses right at the moment and has a lot of marketing going on and this is not going to help one bit.  Reliability of phone service is paramount to business and there are several other internet phone systems competing for their business.

And many, many of the individuals who use it really count on it too.  It has millions of users and if you read the comments from them, this affects many of them, as of course you would expect.  And it is even easier for an individual to download and use another option for now because they can’t use Skype and then very possibly, stay with the new provider instead.

I know that a lot of people use and like Gizmo which is another “free phone for your computer”.  I had thought of looking into Gizmo but was happy with Skype.  If the outage goes on with Skype, I will probably install Gizmo just to have an internet phone.  And if I like it better, Skype may have lost a customer (paying customer, too).  It will be interesting to see what effect this has on Skype.

~Susan Mellott