Following the unexpected two-day service outage many Skype users experienced last week, the company on Thursday announced that it will add an extra week for free to all paying customer plans. The free extra seven days of service will be given to all Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn, and Skype Voicemail customers.
Skypeis services were unavailable for many subscribers on Thursday and Friday of last week thanks to software-related problems. The company later explained that a flood of login requests from Windows PCs that had just been updated and rebooted triggered the problem, but was not the root cause.
The massive number of login requests uncovered a problem where the Skype peer-to-peer network resources could overload, and the self-healing mechanisms could not respond quickly enough. Skype claims the bug in their systems has been fixed.
[Thanks to ComputerWorld for the heads up.]