"Skype blamed the problem on a bug in its software that meant its network became unstable as many clients logged on after the application of patches from Microsoft last week"

A touch of MS disinfectant or a Digital Binary Steroid?

amanfromMars is even working on incomprehensible titles now.

New meds?

Heh. Taking gibberish to new levels. Does amanfromMars work in Marketing/PR?

First Skype, now VoIP. Can't see what all the fuss is about IP-telephony services.

The technology's here, but it's hardly reliable. Apparently BT's 21CN will provide the much-needed backbone for VoIP to run properly, but at the moment, BT's network has trouble handling PSTN and ADLS over copper, never mind adding VoIP into the mix.

The way VoIP is set up as well, with eg Skype running as a P2P service on your machine hardly fills me with confidence. Too much emphasis on the end user and their setup, and not enough redundancy from the provider, as these outages have shown.

What's wrong with just picking up the bog-standard telemephone, and mashing it with your dialling wand like we used to?

Moo Telecom have also been plagued with outages recently, due to server failures.

Their dns has been hopping around a lot at one point even pointing to an ntl cable modem!!

Anyway, they appear to be back up now.

But as with most of these providers its generally under investment thats the main issue.