Last 21st of September Skype has suffered it probably worst outage ever. The most popular chat and call service provider was down for hours and it definitely affected a lot of people. The status update and calling features were severely affected and users experienced having their entire contact list in offline status. Skype said that the problem was caused by their 'larger than usual' configuration change. As a result of the changes made, some versions of Skype weren't able to process the configurations correctly. Users get disconnected and as a result of their attempts to reconnect, heavy traffic was created - thus, resulting to the outage.
However, as promised, the company was able to resolve the problem and everything is under control once again. Now, news is that Skype is giving people 20 minutes of free credit to use for calls as a form of their apology for the September 21 issue.
The free call apology bouquet will be available for seven days from the moment you receive the message from Skype that explains your free credits. The free minutes can be used in calling over 60 landline and 8 mobile destinations worldwide.
Skype's post says, "Sometimes saying sorry just isn't enough. To make it up to you, over the next few days we will add 20 minutes of free calls to over 60 landline and 8 mobile destinations around the world*. Make sure that you look out for your free calls as they will be available to use for 7 days."
Although it's just a 20-minute gift credit as a compensation to hours of outage, it's a big thing. Companies as big as Skype and Microsoft don't always give compensations for a general outage, but Skype did go the extra mile by giving away free credits to users, instead of just pretending nothing happened after fixing the problem.
