Skype plans to compensate users for outage

Matthew DeCarlo

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Skype suffered a massive outage yesterday that knocked most users offline. In an update this morning, Skype CEO Tony Bates said service has been fully restored for users in Europe and the Eastern US. Around 16.5 million people were online at the time of the report, which Bates equated to about 80% of the usual headcount for that time of day.

"We are bringing up the service in a controlled manner and things are moving in the right direction," Bates said. Skype's core functionality, such as IM, audio and video have been stabilized, but features such as offline IM and group video calling will take longer to restore.

"It's been a tough 24 hours for many of you – and I'd like to thank you for your patience as we bring Skype back to normal." Bates said the company is exploring the possibility of issuing a credit voucher to paying Skype customers, but there aren't any details on that yet.

The outage seems to have been an eye-opener for Skype. Bates explained that it has made the company more aware of how reliant people are on the service. Additionally, Skype plans to focus on communicating with users more during future downtimes.

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wow, the first CEO which actually seemed to give a damn about its users. Or at least, I felt the video seemed genuine...
 
He's wearing a hoodie... That's the sort of CEO I like, sod all that suit malarkey! :haha:
 
At least they're doing their best to get the service back up in the shortest time possible. Which is of course quite comendable considering that Skype is essentially a free service and I would think only a small fraction of the 25 million or so users are actually paying customers.
 
I am such a newbie! When Skype didn't connect yesterday, I thought it was my computer and uninstalled it. Now am re-installing it today. I have the subscription that allows me to make unlimited landline calls within my country, for $8 per month. Good value!
 
i uninstalle skype an tried to re-install it but failed. an error message comes up. is this related to the trouble Skype is having ?
 
Why is there something telling me they did this on purpose just to see how many people actually relied on their service?

I know it sounds a bit excessive, but then again, there's only so much we do know...
 
To bad that don't care about the users that want to call Alaska. That's the only reason we bought two of them...
 
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