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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Skype offers $1 voucher to customers for 24 hours of downtime


On December 22nd, Skype experienced a 24 hour outage. This was a pretty big deal since people use Skype for work, and plenty of other people use it for pleasure. Today Skype posted a detailed technical explanation of what went wrong. In summary, there were a bunch of events that led to the P2P network becoming unstable, which then led to a critical failure.

The tech explanation is actually pretty cool to read through, but the part that I found particularly interesting is that Skype then sent customers a voucher as part of an apology.

I’m a Skype user and pay yearly for Skype unlimited. As a result I received an e-mail from Skype, with the aforementioned apology, and a a credit voucher. Being a person who never passes up a deal, I redeemed my voucher only to soon see that even though Skype was touting it as a

“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 …”

it was really just $1.00. Granted, $1 will get you far on Skype, but still, there was a lot of negative publicity around this outage, so if you’re going to offer up a voucher of some sort, it should probably amount to more than a $1.

Regardless, I’m happy that the service has been restored and I don’t know when I’ll use that $1, since I’ve already paid for the year.

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