Skype Recovers From Significant Outage

The worst outage in Skype's seven-year history ended Thursday morning after a technical glitch plunged it into darkness most of Wednesday.

Millions of users of the Internet-phone service weren't able to make video and audio calls, and exchange instant messages Wednesday —Skype's most prolonged service interruption since it went down one day in 2007. Then, however, it had far fewer members.

By noon Eastern time Thursday, things had improved. Skype has "seen evidence of a significant increase in the number of people online," Skype spokesman Peter Parkes says.

Skype is estimating 17 million people, about 80% to 85% of its normal traffic this time of day, are using the service now.

"The root cause was software," Skype CEO Tony Bates said in a phone interview Thursday. "We had to temporarily bring in some dedicated servers and shift resources to get back online."

Bates said Skype will offer users credits for the service interruption. Though highly unlikely, he did not rule out the possibility the service was the victim of a malicious digital attack.

"We are really apologetic for what happened," says Bates, who took over as CEO just eight weeks ago.