Skype, the popular Internet phone and instant messaging program, was recovering on Thursday from an outage on Wednesday that took almost all 23 million users offline. Skype announced the first improvements on a much-used communication alternative, Twitter, on Thursday.
Skype’s CEO Tony Bates apologized in a video on Thursday for the trouble people encountered not being able to reach their relatives, friends, and colleagues. He said paying customers would receive vouchers, which “can be used to give you approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world.”
At 7:30 p.m. Thursday night, 90 percent of normal user volume had been reached, Bates said in a video posted on Skype’s Twitter account. Its “core functionality,” as in instant messaging, audio, and video had been stabilized, Bates said.
Bates explained that bringing on temporarily “dedicated supernodes” has worked to restore the service, and an attack as a possible cause of the outage has been ruled out.
Skype works with supernodes, which are computers used by Skype, necessary for figuring out how to reach the person one wants to contact. The company stated on a tweet that Skype “relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running.”
On Wednesday, many of these supernodes “were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype.”
Skype’s CEO Tony Bates apologized in a video on Thursday for the trouble people encountered not being able to reach their relatives, friends, and colleagues. He said paying customers would receive vouchers, which “can be used to give you approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world.”
At 7:30 p.m. Thursday night, 90 percent of normal user volume had been reached, Bates said in a video posted on Skype’s Twitter account. Its “core functionality,” as in instant messaging, audio, and video had been stabilized, Bates said.
Bates explained that bringing on temporarily “dedicated supernodes” has worked to restore the service, and an attack as a possible cause of the outage has been ruled out.
Skype works with supernodes, which are computers used by Skype, necessary for figuring out how to reach the person one wants to contact. The company stated on a tweet that Skype “relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running.”
On Wednesday, many of these supernodes “were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype.”
