Over the last day or so, Skype users may have noticed the service has become inaccessible. Skype admitted there was a worldwide outage that affected every free user, subscriber and pay-as-you-go customer.
Developers over at Skype have been hard at work to restore the online chat and video service to customers, posting continuous updates on the restore progress. Rumors and speculation filled the Internet that Skype may have been at the end of a malicious attack, but after further investigation, Skype has concluded that this isn"t the case.
We now understand the cause of the problem and we believe it was not caused by a malicious attack. But, we are still doing a full analysis and we will provide an in-depth post-mortem.
Skype"s CEO Tony Bates posted a personal appeal video on YouTube, apologizing for the outage. Bates then offered every pay-as-you-go customer a free 30 minute phone call to anywhere in the world, redeemable at any time, and a one-free week to all subscribers, at the time of their renewal.
So what exactly happened? According to some sources, a large number of supernodes went down, effectively shutting down Skype. Apparently, most of the supernodes were taken offline, due to a problem with some versions of Skype.