With Skype's Wednesday outage lasting over almost 30 hours and affecting users with certain version Skype versions, the Luxembourg-based company has decided to offer refunds to all its paying customers - comprising nearly 1.4 percent of the total 560 million users - who were unable to the access the service during the outage.

Announcing the refund for the paying customers, Skype said that it will give its `pre-pay' and `pay-as-you-go' users 30 minutes of free calling; along with giving one week's extra subscription to its active subscribers.

Noting that the company was fixing the problem that caused the outage, CEO Tony Bates recently said on the Skype blog that the company's technical team has been able to successfully "stabilize" the popular IP communications service. Bates also added that the service is gradually returning "to normal" with the technical team rapidly adding new "mega-supernodes" to the Skype network.

Further reporting that Skype is "at roughly 90 percent of normal user volumes," Bates elaborated: "Audio, video and IM are running normally. But, a couple of our offerings, including offline IM and Group Video Calling, are not available yet, and we are working hard to restore them in due course."

Though Bates stopped short of elucidating what had caused the recent outage of the Skype service, he did say that the company had found out the reason for the crash; and that it has been "able to mitigate that crash risk."