Skype Crisis: Where were the eBay Management?
It has been an interesting 30 hours for Skype, its community and its engineers. The outage that caused anxiety amongst millions who depend on Skype for communications exposed the fragility of our digital lives. — And in this moment of crisis, eBay's senior management was AWOL.
Context & Ripple Effects
GigaOM's criticism lands less than two years after the outlet flagged dark clouds gathering over Skype back in November 2005, when questions about the service's direction under eBay ownership were already circulating. The August 2007 outage — sign-on failures resolved on August 18, with presence and chat still degraded and hours from full recovery — turned those earlier doubts into an operational test.
Skype's own blog posts during the crisis ('The words we've all been waiting for') show the company communicating directly with users while, per GigaOM, eBay's senior leadership stayed publicly absent. The critique matters because millions of users had made Skype their default communications layer, making the parent company's silence a governance question, not just a PR one.
First-order effects
- Millions of Skype-dependent users spent roughly 30 hours unable to rely on the service, with sign-in restored only after a day and chat/presence features lagging behind.
- eBay faces immediate reputational damage as its senior management is publicly called out for silence while Skype's engineers and blog team handled user communication alone.
Second-order effects
- Businesses that adopted Skype for everyday work communications are forced to weigh backup channels, threatening the enterprise credibility eBay was counting on to justify its acquisition.
- Competing VoIP and IM providers get a opening to court frustrated Skype users at the moment of maximum dissatisfaction.
Third-order effects
- If outages recur, the episode feeds a structural argument that consumer-grade communications infrastructure demands operational oversight its acquirers may not provide — a question about whether eBay, a marketplace company, should own a real-time communications utility at all.
- The incident strengthens the case for treating always-on services as critical infrastructure, where provider transparency during failure becomes a competitive requirement rather than optional goodwill.
The trend: As communications shift onto single-provider internet services owned by companies outside telecom, outage handling and parent-company accountability become decisive tests of whether those acquisitions hold up.