14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of days ago, Skype services went offline for users across the world, with Microsoft confirming the problems quickly after receiving the first reports and promising a fix supposed to repair connection errors on all supported clients.
The outage lasted for approximately 12 hours during which users were unable to connect to Skype and get in touch with their contacts through voice or video calls.
In a statement released today, Microsoft explains that the outage was caused by what it calls a “larger than usual configuration change,” which disconnected all users from the servers.
“When these users tried to reconnect, heavy traffic was created and some of you were unable to use Skype’s free services, including messaging, presence, and contact list management. Others could not sign in or out of Skype altogether, or make calls to landlines or mobile phones. Skype for Business was not impacted,” the company explained in its post.
“Our apologies”
Microsoft used the very same post as a mea culpa, explaining that the whole team is sorry because so many users were affected by the issue and that the outage lasted more than expected.
“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,” it said.
Right now, all Skype services are running normally and both video and voice calls work just as expected, with Microsoft saying that everything has been fully restored all over the world.
Skype was founded in 2003 and was purchased by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. The service is now available on the majority of desktop and mobile platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, as well as Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. It’s also available in the browser via web.skype.com, without the need for a client.