The chief of Internet VoIP player Skype said that service has been stabilized and restored to around 90% of normal user volumes following Wednesday’s service blackout that knocked tens of millions of Skype users offline for several hours.
Addressing users via the Skype blog, Skype CEO Tony Bates said that audio, video and IM are “running normally”, but services like offline IM and Group Video Calling are not available yet.
“We've been able to successfully stabilize Skype due to the dedicated supernodes deployed by Skype's engineering team,” Bates said.
Bates apologized to users for the outage, and said the company would compensate Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users with a Skype Credit voucher for approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world (the exact number of minutes depending on the rate charges for that country).
Active subscribers will be credited with a week's extra subscription service applied from the user’s next renewal date.
Bates says the cause of the outage is still under investigation, but that the team understands enough to rule out a malicious attack.
“We are still doing a full analysis and we will provide an in-depth post-mortem,” he said.
Skype spokesman Peter Parkes said in an earlier blog post that the problem stemmed from many “supernodes” in the Skype network – computers that serve as phone directories to help Skype users find each other – going offline due to “a problem affecting some versions of Skype”, which effectively prevented users from being able to access the service.
On the business side, speculation is rampant on the web as to what impact the outage will have on Skype financially, both in terms of lost revenues and compensation related to the network crash, and Skype’s plans for an IPO on the Nasdaq exchange.
Skype filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO in August with a target to raise up to $100 million. In the filing, Skype touted the reliability of its peer-to-peer network architecture as a strength compared to conventional telcos.
“Skype's massive pre-Christmas service outage isn't exactly what you'd want if you were an Internet phone shop on the way to an IPO,” stated one article posted on TheStreet.com.
Meanwhile, prior to the service outage, Bates – who took the helm of Skype in October this year after leaving Cisco Systems – has been talking up plans to fuel Skype growth by adding corporate partnerships and new products.