That statement from the OP rubbed me the wrong way. Trusted services going down are a fact of life. It is going to happen. I agree Skype's last outage was three years ago which is a good track record compared to more traditional services that you might pay a lot more for. Other "trusted" services like electricity, water, heat, transportation fail from time to time even in the most modern of cities. The key is how a company responds to it, triages it, and communicates it to their customers (i.e. with frequent updates)
Hopefully, Skype provides a postmortem describing what happened and how they fixed it.
Note: I know some people rely on Skype for their businesses, and that it sucks that it went out. All I'm saying is that most people should have some sort of contingency plan for when this situation occurs.
* that I'm aware of
We have highly redundant communication systems compared to when landlines were the only option and SPOF in the building.
Then there is a high chance that also my land line would be down.
Thinking of it, I must get some homing pigeons _now_ ;)
it's a pretty bad outage though. we're fixing it.
here's some official info http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/skype_downtime_today.html
good luck to fix the bug, you have a great product!
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22nd December 2010 Peter Parkes
Skype downtime today
Skype structureEarlier today, we noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn’t typical or expected, so we began to investigate.
Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network -- instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ -- they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.
Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.
What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations. Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal.
Stay tuned to @skype on Twitter for the latest updates on the situation -- and many thanks for your continued patience in the meantime.
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As to why it was chosen, I can briefly list my (biased) opinion as to the benefits of Delphi: an easier to use language than C++, proven IDE and framework, a lot of third-party code and components available, but without sacrificing low-level control to a VM.