The Skype service is an essential component for many internet-based companies to communicate with industry contacts and share ideas via conferencing. Additionally, the software is a tool to help family members stay in contact across vast distances. As a result, any downtime on Skype can majorly impact on your business and personal life. Sadly, on September 21st, the service encountered a whole host of connection problems and prolonged downtime. This made many users quite angry and disappointed with the speed of troubleshooting.
Microsoft has started to send e-mails out to Skype customers apologizing for the downtime and offered compensation:
“We’re sorry for the technical issue we suffered that day. We know how important our service is to you and how frustrating outages like this can be. We also know that 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 you look out for your free calls as they will be available to use for 7 days.”
It’s still unclear if the 20 minutes of free call time will be offered to every Skype user or only a select few. Although, at least Microsoft has apologized and offered a token gesture to help those affected. To be perfectly honest, I doubt many people will be overly bothered by now, and just accept that downtime can happen as part of any internet service.
Thank you UberGizmo for providing us with this information.
