Microsoft is facing the music for its most recent blunder: a massive Skype service disruption that affected its entire network. The outage was definitely an inconvenience for many, but to its credit, Microsoft provided full disclosure for the incident, and even offered an apology.
Microsoft claimed that it released a "larger-than-usual" configuration change that some versions of Skype were unable to deploy correctly. This caused users to be disconnected from the network, and the heavy traffic triggered by so many clients attempting to reconnect produced network-wide service interruption of Skype's free services, including messaging, presence and contact list management.
Skype for Business customers were reportedly not affected.
Microsoft worked quickly to address the issue by re-balancing the traffic load, and by midnight GMT, the issue was resolved and free Skype users could once again place calls, send IMs and manipulate their contact lists.
If it weren't for the fact that Microsoft actually took the time to address this problem and issue an official apology, most of us would have likely forgotten about the inconvenience shortly. All too often, large software companies break something, fix it, and say little to nothing about it. However, owning up to the problem and going so far as to apologize for it is refreshingly humanizing for Microsoft, which at times can seem omnipotent, uncaring and unrepentant when it comes to other software-related issues from the company (cue the Windows 8 jokes).
The apology itself seemed over the top, which we read as indicative of legitimate sincerity.
"No matter how quickly we were able to resolve this issue, it would not have been quick enough," read the blog post. "We know many of you needed to use Skype during the outage, and finding that you couldn't would have been incredibly frustrating. We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused to our users, and appreciate your patience while we addressed the issue."
Skype appears to be fixed, and let it not be said Microsoft didn't take this outage to heart.
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