Skype experienced a significant outage last week when many of their supernodes failed. Today the company has provided a post-mortem of the issue on their blog. In a nutshell, Skype introduced hundreds of "mega-supernodes" to the infrastrucutre, realized that the system was not recovering quickly enough, so followed up by adding several thousand more of these mega-supernodes. Service was restored by December 23rd.
Today the company sent out an email to affected users apologizing for the interuptions and offering a $1 credit voucher for the inconvenience.
As 2010 draws to a close, I would like to take a moment to thank each of you for your patience, understanding, and support during Skype’s recent outage.
We know how important your Skype conversations are to you and we take any disruption to our service very seriously. We are pleased to confirm that Skype is back to normal allowing you to connect with friends, co-workers, family and loved ones.
As a valued customer of Skype, we would like to offer you a sincere apology and offer you our gratitude with a credit voucher worth a call of more than 30 minutes to a landline in some of our most popular countries, such as USA, UK, Germany, China, Japan. Or spend it however you like on Skype.
While a dollar may seem like a pittance, if you consider that the outage was only a day and the cost of the service is low, it"s probably a reasonable amount. It"s currently unknown whether this code was sent to users of the free service or if it has only been sent out to paying customers.
Let us know if you have received the email from Skype and what you think of the gesture.