Skype has formally apologized for the worldwide outage users experienced on Monday. In a blog post, the company attributed the extended downtime to a “larger-than-usual” configuration change that resulted in users being disconnected.

The disruption in service put heavy pressure on Skype’s free chat service, which wasn’t able to deal with the increased traffic to messaging, presence, and contact list management. Some users have reported that they couldn’t log in or out of Skype or even use it to make calls to landlines or mobile phones.

Microsoft corporate vice president for Lync and Skype Engineering, Gurdeep Pall, said that Skype for Business wasn’t impacted by the issue and that the team “worked quickly to put in measures to re-balance the traffic load so that normal Skype service could resume.” The problem was fixed around midnight GMT, nearly 24 hours after the incident began.

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