Skype has hundreds of millions of monthly active users, many of which were perturbed this week due to a Skype outage. Microsoft issued an apology through their Skype Blog yesterday and explained the outage.
The outage was caused by a “larger-than-usual configuration change” which disconnected many users from the Skype network because some versions of Skype couldn’t process it correctly. Some users couldn’t use messaging, calling to phones, and other Skype features while others couldn’t use Skype at all. The outage lasted a surprisingly long time even though Microsoft worked to fix the issue immediately after discovering it. In their apology they stated
“No matter how quickly we were able to resolve this issue, it would not have been quick enough. We know many of you needed to use Skype during the outage, and finding that you couldn’t would have been incredibly frustrating.
We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused to our users, and appreciate your patience while we addressed the issue.
Our Apologies.”
The outage has been fixed for over a day now and Skype appears to be running smoothly for users. While the outage was frustrating, it’s good to see that Microsoft made fixing it such a priority. Skype is used by businesses, broadcasters, and private users throughout the world so an outage like this affects not only many users, but users from a variety of markets and client types.