Also worth mentioning that many APIs are down or at least unstable, even if the main service appears up still.

Are there any alternatives worth exploring? Has anyone used Oovoo? (not affiliated in any way, just curious)

Open Source alternatives are Ekiga and QuteCom.

But frankly, on Ubuntu both Ekiga and QuteCom are just as badly integrated (i.e. not at all) and its additional downsides are that there are hardly people using the network; you can hardly call anyone. Yet?

Aside from that, Ekiga is a 1:1 replacement for skype, feature and ease-of-use-wise. Maybe a tad more stable :). On Ubuntu at least.

have you tried PSTN?

Thanks.

If you use Skype's services extensively even before Microsoft came along, you would have noticed a lot of bugs (I know I did, and their support was meh), but they try. I would like to blame Microsoft for this, but I don't have any solid evidence to do so.

A lot of business's rely on Skype, so for them to just go out and say sorry is kind of bullshit. Where are the backup systems. There must be some process put it into place that compensates for situations like this. Maybe Microsoft can throw some coin at Skype now for a brand spankin new data center.

Microsoft has not acquired Skype yet, so it doesn't make sense to try and blame them.

Well until that major outage, I don't know how much infrastructure skype was running. I recall something about supernodes (or super super?) that they would be hosting to prevent these cascading failures. The whole P2P nature was the clever trick, not sure how much more data centers will actually help when it's software bugs that seem to take the system down.

They've spun up "mega-supernodes," when cascading failures have taken the network down before[1], but they don't need to run them full-time, just when traffic is such that the traditional supernodes can't handle the traffic of a new network.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048630

Thanks!

skype's always one step ahead, they are shifting to microsoft quality to make the transition smoother for their customers. :)

I'm getting really sick of the stupid Microsoft remarks. I'm a Mac / Apple guy through and through, but it's just so annoying all the people saying things are going to shit the second M$ gets them, even though when the problem obviously has nothing to do with M$.

You are really funny. You pretend to be the grown-up here and still write M$.

:-)

Skype was reclassified by kids from "awesome software" to "proprietary crap" as soon as Microsoft bought it.

I was hating on Skype way before it was cool. ("What, SIP? It's a pretty obscure protocol; you probably haven't heard of it.")

Try IAX/IAX2, a NAT-transparent VoIP protocol.

I know it's an annoying 90s in-joke, but let's be honest, these instability problems did start happening weeks after Microsoft bought the company. It might not be what trolls suggest but it's certainly some coincidence..!

The instability problems like the major downtime in December, 5 months before Microsoft bought them?

I don't remember that. I use it at work and I've only noticed that there have been a lot more instability problems over the last month. Previous to that it's felt rock-solid to me...

I prefer IRC instead of Skype.

How is this relevant?