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Skype has announced that its free Internet phone service has been stabilised after 48 hours of being offline. According to Skype CEO, Tony Bates, the organisation has “been able to successfully stabilise Skype due to the dedicated supernodes deployed by Skype’s engineering team” thus resulting in restoration roughly 90% of normal user volumes. While Audio, Video and Instant Messaging (IM) are running normally, a couple of other services, including offline IM and Group Video Calling, are not yet available.
Contrary to speculations, the outage is believed to have been caused by something other than a malicious attack. Whilst still under investigation, the problems appear to be technical issues associated with important parts of the Skype network such as, failure of supernodes which are used for routing traffic between users.
So far, Skype is working on restoring 100% services as soon as possible and provide a full analysis of the initial cause of the problem. Meanwhiles, all affected users can expect to receive a Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users Skype Credit voucher by email. The voucher can be used to make approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world. Active subscribers can also expect a week’s extra subscription credit, applicable from the next renewal date.
Talking Point
Did the recent Skype outage affect you?