For anyone who relies on Skype in their day-to-day lives - or anyone trying to co-ordinate festive travel plans online - the days in the run-up to Christmas might have felt like a trip back to the dark ages. The normally reliable VOIP service suffered a massive outage last week that brought the company's servers to its knees and cut call volumes to a fraction of the normal number.
Thankfully the worst of the outage only lasted for about a day, although it took a bit longer before everything was running at full capacity. Normal audio, video and IM chat services were available to all users by December 24, and group video chat was re-instated just in time for Christmas. However, the engineering teams continued to work on restoring offline instant messaging and strengthening the Skype infrastructure throughout the weekend.
For the time being, there are very few details on what caused the outage, although it was thought to be an issue with the supernodes that make up Skype's infrastructure. To help ease the pressure, 'mega-supernodes' have been set up to help handle the load in the interim. A full postmortem is currently underway and more details are expected to be released this week, although the company has confirmed that the outage wasn't the result of a malicious attack.
To try and make amends, exhausted-looking CEO Tony Bates announced that pay-as-you-go and pre-pay users would be receiving a free '30 minute' Skype Out voucher by e-mail. Subscribers to the service will be able to claim a full week's worth of credit, which should be applied from the next renewal date.
More details on the outage are available on the official Skype blog.