Skype: malfunction was due to major configuration update

According to Skype, the long-term outage on Monday, September 21, was caused by a configuration change that was larger than usual and that some versions of Skype didn’t handle properly. As a result, many users were disconnected from the network.

One consequence of shutting down so many users at once was that many tried to log back in at the same time, leading to a general outage for many users. According to Skype’s blog, the business service was not affected by the outage, as it runs on a different infrastructure. The company offers its apologies to users of the regular Skype versions via the blog.

Whether users can expect some kind of compensation is not clear from the blog post. The outage lasted all Monday for many users and was not fully resolved until around 1 am. The VoIP service concludes its mea culpa with: “We are terribly sorry and thank you for your patience in resolving the problem.”