Skype Logo

It's been nearly four days since the popular VOIP service shut down for two days, with the online service slowly working as normal as of this afternoon.

Skype hasn't been too open regarding the crash of the service, but the internet community has certainly come up with some very creative ideas.  Three days before the biggest holiday of the year, the best VOIP and chatting service the internet has to offer began sputtering.  Within a few hours, the service had essentially collapsed.  It would take another 30+ hours before the service was up and running fully.

By Thursday, December 23rd, Skype's online blog replaced the site's download page, keeping new users from downloading the program (who would thus find the same downtime all users were experiencing).   The outage affected users globally, but Skype has officially announced how they would be taking care of their users.

Skype's CEO, who was just hired back in October, Tony Bates issued an official statement right before Christmas which addressed both paying and non-paying Skype customers.  Pay-As-You-Go and Pre-Pay users would be receiving a Skype Credit voucher through email worth roughly 30mins of free calls.  For the company's 'active subscribers', Skype will be credited with one full week of service.  

According to Bates, 'audio, video, and IM are running normally, though a couple of the company's other offerings, including offline IM and Group Video Calling, are not available yet'.  It seems a given that they will be fully restored soon.

Were you affected by the outage?  Many of the large podcasters around the world use Skype as a means to communicate for recording purposes and it's safe to assume that with the VOIP service down that many podcasts schedule to record over the last few days were certainly affected.  Were you able to speak to your loved ones using the service as plans, or did the downtime disrupt your holiday calling?