Skype say that the problem was due to an unexpected interaction between the firm’s servers and account holders' PCs, however, despite Skype’s claim to have fixed the problems some users have reported that they still encountered difficulties over the weekend.
Skype state on their website that the widespread outage began after subscriber's computers around the world re-started after a security software upgrade that Microsoft had issued, and that this caused an unusually high number of people attempting to log on to the system at the same time and the Skype network was unable to cope with the volume.
The statement on the website apologises in this way: "...we'd like to apologise and thank you. Precisely in that order."
Skype problems were reported in many different countries including America, Canada, Brazil, Germany and Finland, and many users have wondered if Skype is going to refund them for all the calls they had to re-direct to other phone services during the period of the outage.
