I was pretty harsh with this mealy mouthed response to the Skype outage a few days ago — but it looks like in a bid to make things right Skype is doing more than just making apologies.
In giving a kind of ‘refund’ to paying users. Some of them anyway: Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers will get 7 extra days added on to their contracts for the 2 days or so that was lost to the outage.
Its unclear whether or not Skype users who merely have Skypeout credit but no plan (like me) will get any kind of refund. Nor, for example, is it clear that free users of Skype will get anything another than an apology — although its hard to make an argument that they should get anything since they’re only using a free service.
However, the guys at Skype get a tip of the hat by doing something right in light of the outage. How it plans to address — if it ever does, perhaps behind the scenes — with business or institutions who may have lost real dollars to the outage, is another matter. And if anyone does happen to hear of that, I’d be happy to know what that is.
