Skype is apparently “back to normal” following the recent 2-day outage. According to the Skype Heartbeat Blog, the outage was caused by a deficiency in Skype’s resource allocation algorithms, which couldn’t cope with the large number of Windows users who rebooted following Microsoft updates. You can read more technical details on the Skype blog.

Sure, it was inconvenient for us - we weren’t able to video chat with our families in the UK, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I’m just glad I don’t rely on it for business reasons, as I know plenty of people do.