In an attempt to apologize to its users for the Wednesday outage of its VoIP service, Skype has decided to offer compensation to its paying customers who could not make calls during the notably long shutdown of the service.

Ever since the outage, the users of Skype's VoIP service faced problems, which continued well past 48 hours, in logging in to the service.

In a statement issued on the Skype blog, the company's chief executive Tony Bates apologized for the outage; and claimed that "dedicated supernodes deployed by Skype's engineering team" had helped stabilize the service to up to almost 90 percent of normal user volumes.

Bates specified that the audio, video and IM were already running normally, though some of the other offerings of the company, including offline IM and Group Video Calling, were not available yet.

Rendering an apology for the outage, and adding that it was difficult to make up for the missed experience, Bates said that Skype will compensate its `Pay As You Go' and `Pre-Pay' with a Skype Credit voucher, which the users can use for getting nearly 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world.

Bates also said: "For our active subscribers, we will credit you with a week's extra subscription service. It may take a few days, but once implemented, it will be applied from your next renewal date."