Are the holidays crashing our social media?
The popular voice, video and chat service Skype, which may be one of the few companies with more users than Facebook, was down this morning. “Calm down, everyone: Skype is down because Julian needs to make a private phone call,” wrote one commenter on the tech blog ReadWriteWeb.
Just as Skype started returning to service this afternoon, everyone’s favorite microblogging site started shorting out. When some users tried to sign on to Twitter to talk about baking reindeer cookies or complain that Skype was down, it was back to the famous fail whale error message.
Twitter’s outage didn’t have anything to with Skype’s, a spokesman told Forbes.com’s Oliver Chiang.
Facebook looks good and Flickr seems to be handling the holiday photo-load just fine, but New York’s own beleagured Tumblr is experiencing some issues. Tumblogs appear to still be online, though, which is good because Twitter’s status blog is powered by Tumblr.
Tech Observer is cheering for Tumblr. If it crashes too, we’ll have to use Google Buzz or something to broadcast our holiday goodwill.
ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries
