Skype Restores Service, Offers Customers Credits

After the longest, most widespread outage in Skype history, the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) company is offering credits to clients. The move comes amid a strong backlash from faithful clients.

"Audio, video and IM are running on the whole. Nevertheless a couple of our offerings, including offline IM and Group Video Calling, are not available but, and we are working hard to restore them in due time," Bates said. "We but understand the cause of the problem and we believe it was not caused by a malicious attack. Yet we are on the whole doing a full analysis and we will provide an in-depth postmortem."

The missed experiences

Although Bates admitted that nothing can make up for the missed experiences, he said Skype will send its pay-as-you-go and prepay users a Skype credit voucher via e-mail. The voucher offers about 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world. Skype is as well crediting active subscribers with a week's extra subscription service.

The root of the problem seems to be the failure of supernodes -- millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running -- due to a software issue. Skype explained that it isn't a network like a conventional phone or IM network. Instead, it relies on those supernodes. In accordance with normal circumstances, Skype explained, there are a large number of supernodes available. Skype was working all week to develop mega-supernodes.

Indeed, the outage was inconvenient -- and costly -- for many businesses. More companies are relying on Skype-like services. To tell the truth, the VoIP and SIP turnkey-services market earned earnings of $717.3 million in 2009 and is estimated to reach $3.9 billion in 2016, according to Frost & Sullivan's innovation.