Messaging is the most common task we perform every day. There are some common messaging apps we use frequently and one of them is Skype. Skype users are quite dependent on the app. As we all know, the app is quite popular worldwide, mostly B2B and B2C companies use this app for regular communication like messaging, calling and file sharing.

On September 21^st 2015, Skype started having issues on consumer version for video calling and messaging. Later on, all version users were experiencing various technical issues like log in, changing status, managing contact lists and update pages on forums. Microsoft confirmed the outage on a website dedicated to the updates of Skype and relevant products. The company apologized to the users and announced, they were working hard to fix all the issues and all errors are soon to be resolved. Their apology to users also appeared on their official and support pages of social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Complaints regarding the operations of Skype were revolving everywhere in social media and forums.The outage lasted around 15 hours. According to Down Detector, the affected areas were mainly Europe and Japan. However, with a detailed mapping of complaints received from users, the issues were visible globally as far as the UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Ukraine.

Some versions were unable to process the recent release of the configuration change which subsequently caused this outage. Corporate Vice President Gurdeep Pall, mentioned

 “Some versions of Skype were unable to process correctly therefore disconnecting users from the network”.

Skype officials said,

“When these users tried to reconnect, heavy traffic was created and some of you were unable to use Skype’s free services, including messaging, presence, and contact list management. Others could not sign in or out of Skype altogether, or make calls to landlines or mobile phones. Skype for Business was not impacted”.

The issues mainly rose for the free services offered by Skype; still the paid version was causing major issues. Skype for Business users, who were installing Microsoft’s new Office 2016 for Windows suite of apps, started reporting issues with Skype for Business compatibility with the suite app. The issue which was mostly reported of was the inability for the application to sync. Microsoft officials announced the reason for this issue to be the upgrading of the latest version of Microsoft Office.

On September 22^nd 2015, Skype officials released an apology statement for the users, “We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused to our users, and appreciate your patience while we addressed the issue”.Some users were receiving messages for uninstalling Skype for Business, as the users uninstalled, their Skype for Business clients were removed without an available replacement.

We are dependent on digital space provided by the cloud services. Users rely on their cloud space as it is provided by Microsoft. After this incident, Skype has lost reliability of the consumers and users have yet again been penalized for relying so much on apps. Skype outage has made the consumers rethink about the app they are relying on.