Microsoft has informed iTWire editor-in-chief Stan Beer that it has fixed the problems with his Skype account.
Beer said he was able to log in this morning about 6am and found that his data had been preserved. He was overjoyed after spending a sleepless night wondering what he would do in the event that he had to recreate all the information stored in his Skype account over the time since iTWire was started in 2005.
On Thursday evening, Beer found himself locked out of his Skype account and had to chase Microsoft support for help.
His emails finally made their way to Microsoft's Global Escalation Services.
{loadposition samo8}On Friday evening, he was told that there were multiple users who were having trouble signing into their Skype accounts. "I believe we may be experiencing a bit of an outage," the escalation supervisor wrote.
But he also offered some reassurance: "The good news is that your Skype account and details are still intact and have not be deleted. I have engineers investigating the issue with your account and I will provide an update within the next 24 hours."
This morning AEDT, Beer received another email from the same individual. It said Beer's account lockout was not connected to the outage. Rather the causes of the lockout were risk and security reasons.
"It appears the suspension was placed by our automated system. I contacted our security team and asked them to review your account to ensure there were no red flags to act on. They confirmed your account was secured and removed the suspension," the escalation supervisor said.
There was no indication given as to what had triggered the account suspension.
The supervisor added: "With the suspension being removed you should be able to log in with your Skype account. If you still receive an error when attempting to sign in please reset the password for your Microsoft Account... After resetting the password attempt to sign in with your Skype account again."
On its Skype heartbeat page, Microsoft says that the login issue is fully resolved. But the Skype support Twitter account is yet to be updated and still says: "While we investigate the issues affecting signing in to Skype, you can login and use Skype for Web instead."