Calling France with Skype and Hangouts is temporarily free after attacks

Both Microsoft with Skype and Google with Hangouts have temporarily made their VoIP services free for calls to French numbers. Both services are doing this in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris.

Skype reports via its weblog that calls made with both fixed and mobile French numbers do not have to be paid for the time being. This applies to calls to and from France. With this, the service wants to make it easier to contact people in Paris, following the attacks on Friday evening in the French capital.

The same goes for Google’s Hangouts chat service. The internet giant already announced on Friday night that it would temporarily abolish the call charges for calls to French numbers. The company did this via a post on Google+. Incidentally, with Hangouts, only calling a French number seems to be free. It is not known how long the calls will remain free for both Skype and Hangouts.

Other web services also responded after the attacks in Paris. For example, Facebook set up temporary profile photos where a transparent French flag can be projected over the set photo and users who were in the affected area could indicate on the site that they were safe. At the time of writing, it is known that 129 people were killed in Friday night’s attacks, in which terrorists fired machine guns at civilians in several places in Paris and blew themselves up. The death toll is expected to rise further as hundreds more people, many in critical condition, remain in hospital.