Skype to compensate users for service outage

Skype is slowly recovering from a major outage over the past few days. The firm has offered to compensate its paying customers to say sorry.

Users of the company's VoIP service were not able to log in to Skype on Wednesday.

The company's chief, Tony Bates, who took over only in October, apologised for the disruption of service and said today the service had been roughly restored to 90 per cent of normal user volumes.

Many computers that act as supernodes - the systems that provide directory information on Skype – went offline due to a problem in certain versions of the service on Wednesday which resulted in the call volumes falling by half.

Skype normally services about 20 million calls daily, but the outage hit thousands of users of mobile and desktop versions of Skype in the US, Europe and Asia.

"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," said Bates in a blog post yesterday.