The Luxembourg company said 5 million people were using Skype early Thursday morning, about 30 percent of normal for that time of day. Get the latest news alerts: Follow LTW at Twitter.Skype was rapidly bringing its calling service back online today after a software problem arose Wednesday that disconnected millions of families, friends, colleagues, and businesses just days before Christmas. Skype has indicated that it wants to list its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market. sold its majority stake in the business for about $2 billion to an investor group that includes Skype’s founders. Earlier this year, AT&T Inc.’s Internet-based “U-verse” phone system went down for several hours, affecting 1.15 million customers. Other Internet-based calling services that compete with the traditional phone system also have problems with consistent service. Skype’s popularity around the globe stems in large part from the free or cheap calls it provides. Users pay for services such as making calls from a PC to a landline or cell phone. Skype’s software offers a range of free services, including the ability to make voice or video calls and send instant messages to other Skype users. Skype is still working out details for vouchers to compensate people who suffered from the downtime. He joined Skype from Cisco Systems Inc., the maker of networking gear, two months ago. Skype repurposed some servers to act as supernodes, which is why non-core services including group chats still aren’t working, the CEO said.īates said Skype is trying to do everything it can to make sure the service is always available, but that he has learned a lot of lessons about disaster recovery and communication with customers during this outage. Supernodes are computers that the company likens to phone directories, helping Skype users connect with each other. Skype on Wednesday said a problem affecting some versions of Skype caused many of its “supernodes” to go offline.
In a video posted on the company blog, Bates said the problems “completely took almost every user offline.” On average, 124 million people use Skype each month, though the total number of registered users is more than four times that. “We are still doing an in-depth post-mortem.” “We have a very good handle on what caused the problem,” Bates said.
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