Setback for business after massive investment
Microsoft has confirmed it is dealing with an ongoing global Skype outage in the latest example of the channel suffering from a disruption in a cloud service it sells to customers.
Skype for Business is the unified communications portfolio that Microsoft has poured channel resources into to enable it to compete against more established unified comms solutions.
The Skype outage follows recent downtime incidents affecting Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 productivity suite, which, like Skype, is also sold by a number of managed service providers.
It is believed the Skype outage is a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the company. Microsoft says Skype is suffering "connectivity issues". While the problem does not affect all users, it is being reported as a global outage by Microsoft.
Stephanie Weagle, VP of Corero Network Security, said of the outage: "It's clear that DDoS attacks continue to impact even the largest global organisations. Continuing to rely on traditional IT security and/or human intervention to deal with the growing DDoS epidemic will continue to prove devastating to businesses. Proactive, automated protection is required."