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.