Skype Outage: An Update, and an Apology

Author: Gurdeep Pall

Date: Sept 22, 2015

At Skype, our mission is to give you the tools you need to be closer and do more with the people who matter to you most. It's a simple commitment, but one which we hold ourselves highly accountable for. Yesterday, we experienced an issue at the Skype back-end that prevented us from delivering on our mission.

We released a larger-than-usual configuration change, which some versions of Skype were unable to process correctly therefore disconnecting users from the network. When these users tried to reconnect, heavy traffic was created and some of you were unable to use Skype's free services, including messaging, presence, and contact list management. Others could not sign in or out of Skype altogether, or make calls to landlines or mobile phones. Skype for Business was not impacted.

As always, our users are our priority. So, as soon as we became aware of the issue, we worked quickly to put in measures to re-balance the traffic load so that normal Skype service could resume. By midnight GMT, the issue had been fixed and you were calling and sending IMs again straight away.

No matter how quickly we were able to resolve this issue, it would not have been quick enough. We know many of you needed to use Skype during the outage, and finding that you couldn't would have been incredibly frustrating.

We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused to our users, and appreciate your patience while we addressed the issue.

Our Apologies.