Skype says sorry with week of free service

 

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By Miya Knights

Posted on 24 Aug 2007 at 12:27

Skype is offering paying customers a week's free service to compensate for last week's outage, which brought the VoIP service to its knees.

The VoIP service provider contacted customers after its service went down for two days last weekend, following a routine Windows service update which caused a widespread crash of its systems.

"As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we're adding an additional seven days to your current subscription free of charge,"
Skype spokeswoman Imogen Bailey said in the email.

"And even if you didn't miss out on using Skype last week, you can still have a week free on Skype, on the house."

Many users of the peer-to-peer VoIP service experienced problems logging onto its systems last weekend due to, what Skype said at the time, was a previously unseen software bug within its network resource allocation algorithm.

The bug was uncovered by an unusually high number of restarts and subsequent login requests after users had downloaded the Windows update, coupled with a lack of P2P network resources.

It remains to be seen whether this sweetener will persuade premium service customers who were disrupted by the provider's first major outage to stay with Skype, particularly in what analysts said is a market already crowded with alternative providers eager to capitalise on the market leader's gaff.