14 DAY TRIAL // The last week's Skype downtime was a very important matter especially for the producer of the application but also for the rivals of the company. Although it was reported that JAJAH was the biggest winner of Skype's outage, the folks working at the Sunnyvale giant Yahoo said that their instant messaging application, Yahoo Messenger, also recorded an important increase of usage right when Skype was unavailable. According to Vnunet.com, the Yahoo representatives said that most of the users were lured by the Phone Out technology implemented into Yahoo Messenger that allows consumers to call phone owners from every corner of the world.
"During a two-day period from 16 to 17 August Yahoo Messenger experienced a substantial increase in usage of the Phone Out service," Yahoo spokeswoman Monica Ma said for Vnunet. If you didn't know, the Sunnyvale company always tried to become a powerful VoIP competitor but Skype managed to face the competition and remained the most popular solution in its category.
Although Skype managed to deal with the problem and repaired it after very-hard-to-wait period of 24 hours, the parent company is now aiming to repair its image and invites users to its technologies.
"We'd like to reassure our users across the globe that we've done everything we need to do to make sure this doesn't happen again. We've already introduced a number of improvements to our software to ensure our users will not be similarly affected - in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring," Skype's creators wrote on the official blog.
"As a goodwill gesture to faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we are adding an additional seven days to your current subscription free of charge. And even if you did not miss out on using Skype last week, you can still have a week free on Skype," the parent company added into an email sent to the premium users according to Vnunet.