Skype has suffered an outage today, that still continues, meaning that web workers around the globe, like myself, have had an unusually quiet day — with far fewer IM interruptions but also a strange kind of isolation. What’s also made today standout is that in all the time that I’ve been a Skype user, I don’t remember it ever going down. Sure there has been poor connections and some odd behavior, where contacts disappear and reappear intermittently for no apparent reason, but never has the service been totally unavailable. As much as today’s outage has been an inconvenience, the fact that it’s been so noticeable is perhaps testament to Skype’s overall robustness.

In a poll we ran during our launch week here at last100, we asked ‘Can Skype replace your landline?‘, noting that, for business at least, the peer-to-peer technology on which Skype is based, might not be ready for prime time.

Of the 323 people who voted, 49% said it was good enough for social life but not business. While 20% said Skype had never let them down. Until today I was more or less in the latter camp.

A statement on the company’s site says that we can expect full service to resume in 12 – 24 hours. That’s a long time to put your business on hold.