“We know how much you rely on Skype, and we know that we fell short in both fulfilling your expectations and communicating with you during this incident,” Rabbe added.

“Lessons will be learned and we will use this as an opportunity to identify and introduce areas of improvement to our software, further assess and invest in capacity and stability, and develop better processes for outage recovery and communications to our user base.”

The incident has called into question the technology’s stability and suitability for use by businesses as a replacement for existing landline phone systems. Rabbe noted that Skype had already fixed the bug but acknowledged that most users had yet to download the latest version.

Rabbe said Skype is examining automatic updates to prevent a repeat occurence. The company also plans to invest to expand the capacity of both the free and paid services next year.