1.3 million people in New Orleans. Only 4 on the network. This is a screenshot from yesterday afternoon of a Skype search for users in New Orleans. A virtual metropolis unplugged as Hurricane Katrina darkens the real one. Sending chat messages out, all of the remaining few are offline.

News reports told of land lines shutting down as telephone buildings flooded. Then of cell phones working for hours as roof-top siting kept them relatively dry and running on backup power for a while. Then of both mobile phones and towers running out of power and going dark.

New Orleans will light up again. In the mean time, if you are involved in disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina, the hurricanekatrina tag may help others find you and either get or offer help. Write it into your Skype profile's About field.

Skype's network is fine despite the loss of users and supernodes in Katrina's wake. Is there anything else Skype Technologies should do to make Skypenet at least as resilient as the Internet?

See also:

• Disaster recovery links
• flickr photos