Skype says recovery almost complete

Skype on Thursday said that the majority of users were back online. CEO Tony Bates estimated to GigaOM that 16.5 million of the 25 million total simultaneous users could now login after Wednesday's worldwide outage. Voice as well as chat and video were back online, but conferencing on chat and video wouldn't be working for awhile as they were being used as supernotes for the peer-to-peer service, Bates said.

The executive promised that there would be "formal compensation" for those who were depending on the service for communication, although what that would entail hadn't been determined as of Thursday.

He did narrow down the focus of the problem and blamed some Windows versions of Skype for the problem, as bugs in the apps created a self-reinforcing flaw where users couldn't connect to supernodes and thus themselves couldn't participate in Skype. The company had its own conclusions but would still conduct a "postmortem" to be sure of what happened.

Regardless of outcome, the outage would influence how Skype talked to the public in the future, Bates added.

By Electronista Staff