Another update: Skype stabilized
I wanted to continue to update you on the status of the outage. We’ve been able to successfully stabilize Skype due to the dedicated supernodes deployed by Skype’s engineering team. We’re at roughly 90 percent of normal user volumes.
Audio, video and IM are running normally. But, a couple of our offerings, including offline IM and Group Video Calling, are not available yet, and we are working hard to restore them in due course.
We now understand the cause of the problem and we believe it was not caused by a malicious attack. But, we are still doing a full analysis and we will provide an in-depth post-mortem.
Nothing can make up for the missed experiences, but we’re going to be sending our Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users a Skype Credit voucher via email. The voucher can be used to give you approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world.*
For our active subscribers, we will credit you with a week’s extra subscription service. It may take a few days, but once implemented, it will be applied from your next renewal date.
Again, we sincerely apologize to all of you for this service outage and the inconvenience it has caused. We know how important it is for Skype to be available, so you can connect to your friends, family and colleagues.
Your can continue to stay tuned for more updates either on this blog or by following @skype.
* The exact number of minutes of calls you’ll be able to make will depend on our rates for the country you want to call.
Thank you, Tony…and thanks to your entire team at Skype! This outage was very challenging for me, as I do rely on Skype for a large percentage of communication, both personally and professionally. Checking in with the tweets and blog posts…and then these videos…really helped me be patient. You seem pretty rung out, Tony…not surprising for what I’m sure you’ve been through. I hope you and your team will be able to get some rest soon, put this behind you, and enjoy your holidays.
Many Blessings to You and Yours,
Maura Leon
Excellent news and thanks for the freebies! Good to see an organization that knows how to manage a crisis appropriately!
Well done guys! Great job and just want to say thank you to all of you for your dedication and hard work, especially at this time of year when it is important for family and friends to connect.
Thank you
Merle
South Africa
Thanks for your work to get things right. The credit is a nice perk. Since we live in the PRC we worried you would be down for Christmas and we’d be unable to communicate w/ family in the USA. Thanks for providing such a great service!
.
Mr. Bates, Thank You for your video updates. These are the best from SKYPE so far.
You look and sound tired and for all your work, I am sure users appreciate your dedication.
Now that was a much more sincerely spoken update. The word apology only rolled out a couple of times and most of the update was starting to become specific in nature about what they are doing to fix the problem. We still did not hear why they did NOT have a disaster contingency plan prepared in advance for a loss of SUPERNODES.
Next I would like to hear about their future plan for more immediate communication. TWITTER updates just are NOT enough in my opinion as they said nothing. The BLOG was also lacking and was not routinely updated.
This video technique seemed to me to be a better option.
The BLOG index and search function should also be improved as it is quite difficult to find these “hidden” update messages.
Even the link on your YouTube video did not get to this message on your site.
Please consider creating a disaster response plan including a communication plan that minimizes the use of TWITTER.
Thanks again for your hard work.
May I thank you for solving this problem quick and by keeping us informed on the proceeding of solving the problem.
Thanx for the good service, I am a daily Skype user, without you guys live would be much more difficult..
Have a nice Christmas and a succesfull 2011
H. Cole
Dear Skype team,
I wanted to make you know that last night I was able to use Skype with some friends, and I am very glad you fixed it all.
Do you remember the block which there was on august 2007? At first I though we were in a similar situation. But thanks to some articles I received in some mailing lists where I am subscribed, I knew exactly what was going on there.
Merry Chrsistmas and happy new year, hoping no more blocks will happen in 2011, lol!
Warmest regards from Italy.
Michele Barbi
Just wanted to say thanks for such a great service even though there has been a major disruption recently. I’ve encouraged a lot of my non-tech friends to signup and after some initial fear of the technology, it has made a great contribution to their lives, knowing that any of their friends are just a call away, without worrying about cost. It has brought a lot of peace of mind to many people.
Many may be outraged at the recent outage, but with all technology, things can go wrong. The benefits Skype has brought to modern life, greatly outweight any inconvenience recently caused.
Well done to all at Skype for your hard work and dedication to making our friendship and businesses work.
Seamus OBrien
Thanks for the update & transparency Tony!
This was a good and responsible move. Many companies (my current phone service provider is one) have outages and offer no compensation whatsoever, not even an apology or a sorry.
it was terrible…please don’t do it again, some of us use skype as our first option to call, so we got uncommnicated if you are down…also congrats for compesating your clients, that say a lot about your commitment with us.
Well Thanks Mr. Bates for being open and transparent with your users.
As a user of Skype, i find this very appreciative, however a voucher of 1$ doesn’t compensate the low quality service i receive making calls in the MENA region ! needless to say the countless dropped calls i was charged for, especially that i have paid huge amounts so far using Skype services?
What do you think
It’s so refreshing when a business makes retribution without being asked or begged. Whenever we have a cable or hydro outage we have to almost beg for a credit on our bills but Skype is a good corporate citizen and i applaud them. Thanks. Ed from Waterdown, Canada
Dear Tony Bates
As a private and corporate customer I’d just like to say that i deeply cherish Skype. I’m away from my family 300+ days a year as part of my traveling job all over the world. I wouldnt know what to do, if skype wasnt available to me. I IM, videochat and used the call-function in skype and it is simply brilliant. So thank you!
As for the skype fallout it was unfortunate that it happened so close to a big holliday like christmas. And now u offer a voucher as a “we’re-sorry”-gift – that makes me love skype even more – that u actually care at skype… Keep rockin on, and tell ur staff they’re doin’ one h… of a job! Nice work!!
Regards
A skype user, DK
Are you kidding me? I was a bit underwhelmed by the $1 voucher. Probably better idea next time to not bother troubling your users…
Thank you for keeping me in the picture. SKYPE is a good company so I understand you may have problems from time to time. I am very happy with the excellent service from you guys. I wish you and all those involved in skype a very Happy New Year and many more wonderful years of skyping. Best regards, Ken J Lancaster (lancasterkenj)
thank you to all at SKYPE for your honesty, and for keeping us up to date with developements. Also a thank you for the email and voucher. It is VERY rare in this day and age for large companies to care about anything and to offer good customer service. SKYPE did ..thnak you…
Thank you Tony and thanks at all guys!!
Mr. Bates: This failure was just a day in the life of Skype. All businesses have experienced problems, some bigger, some smaller. Pick any day in any of the world wars to date, and your day was simply a minor inconvenience to your clients. Thank you for solving the problem right away and for the compensation to your patrons. You have added great value to Skype and that is by simply putting a human characteristic to a corporation. We all have problems, but not all of us are willing to take responsibility and admit to them, and provide the correct, common sense solution. I wish you continued success as it will benefit myself and many, many others along the way.
Indeed $1 is underwhelming when I spend in excess of $60 a month with skype sometimes 3 or 4 times that.
Ever since the recent upgrade I have been unable to login to skype. SO yet again skype needs deleting and re-installing.. I am now looking at alternatives, seriously it has got that bad.
Tony
its really interesting to see the personal responses from the non-business customers here. Its also interesting to note the one response from the traveling sales man who relies on SKYPE to keep in touch with his family – something totally outside of any reasonable commercial use one would think.
It’s also amazing how incompetent the SKYPE IT Team was in this matter. Sure they responded quickly to something that should have never happened but bluntly the real issue is why the network architects and the masters of Skype and the service never planned for this type of outage or ran any key sims to model the effects of the p2p overload as you topically describe it.
What I am telling you is that you screwed the pooch and at this point the Shareholders probably deserve a full independant technology audit to insure that they got what they bought which is something at this time which is bringing me to immediately close both of my SKYPE accounts.
Thanks for showing me why Skype MUST be regulated as a normal communications carrier so these types of outages simply dont happen anymore.
TSG//
Todd Glassey
Dear Sir, (attn Skpe CEO Tony Bates)
In future, will it be possible to differentiate or prioritise paying subscribers from non-paying subscribers in the event of a failure, certainly when it comes to the recovery process?
Quite a few hours after I became aware of this problem, still not being able to log in, I had to humbly do a last minute ‘abort’ via e-mail, on an important international conference call with a client (at the time, from Cirencester UK to Singapore). My contingency mobile phone had also unfortunately given up in the -6C reported in Gloucstershire a couple of days earlier.
I suspect the 30 mins airtime gesture won’t be very meaningful to those like me who actually needed the service, and wanted to pay for it at the time.
I’d really appreciate an off-line reply from you if possible please. I need to know to what extent I can rely on Skype as an international service moving forwards.
With thanks,
Martin
Thanks for the update but please don’t bother about a $1 voucher again. It’s primed for ridicule and hardly worth the effort of claiming.
This is what I call bad PR. Probably 99% of users did not even notice the outage or figured it was related to their own internet connection. And 99% of those who noticed probably resorted to an alternative communication method (I used a calling card for example).
I believe people want things to be simple. And one of the most frustrating experiences is to lose time. What annoyed me was not the outage but the pseudo 50cent compensation which I wasted about 2 hours trying to get with no success. Now I am annoyed. Now I feel ripped off.
And only to add insult to injury, I actually read tthe 20 page essay regarding mega-supernodes…?
The cure was definitely worst than the disease. Instead of insuring customer satisfaction, this confusing apologetic mayhem is probably aimed at the investors of Skype. You have managed to turn an indifferent user into an annoyed user. I am now reconsidering leaving my credit card in the pre-paid plan…what if another supermegahyper node fails? This sounds so complicated.
Keep it simple.