So, what should we do the next time Skype goes down? Resort to communicating, like, face to face or something? In the meantime, Skype is 'investigating' the possibility of offering credits to paying Skype users (yes, many people pay to use Skype for voice calls to regular phone numbers, myself included) whose service was disrupted Wednesday, Bates said, adding that details for issuing the credits still needed to be worked out. For now, that means anyone hoping to engage in group video chat or send offline IMs is out of luck.Īs Bates noted in the YouTube video, Skype engineers were forced to compensate for the lost supernodes by creating their own 'mega-supernodes' - cobbled together, apparently, using servers that normally handle Skype features like group video chat and offline IM.Īs TechCrunch observes, that's probably just a 'short-term solution' until Skype traces the root cause of Wednesday's outage and cooks up a permanent solution.

The bad news is that Skype engineers ended up repurposing some servers used for other Skype features - namely group video chat and offline instant messaging - to shore up the 'core' video and audio chat services. In a blog post and in a just-posted YouTube video, Skype CEO Tony Bates said that as of Thursday morning, about 16.5 million users were back online - still only about 80 percent of the number you'd normally expect to see using Skype on a given weekday morning, but greatly improved from Wednesday, when as few as 1.6 million users were connected.īates said that Skype's 'core services,' such as audio, video and text chat, had been 'stabilized' after engineers rejiggered a series of servers to act as 'supernodes,' or Skype clients that help one Skype user locate and connect to another. The root cause of Wednesday's massive Skype failure is still a mystery, however. After a daylong outage that left untold millions of Skype users high and dry, the CEO of the peer-to-peer chat service apologized, promised that service is slowly but surely being restored, and announced that credits may be in the offing for paying users.

Skype ceo parody