One fine morning, you wake up to see that Skype has been extremely generous to give you $4.29 Million Dollar Skype credit.

And you start to wonder, what good karma has resulted in this reward?

Have we finally found an Utopian World where companies are generous and caring towards their loyal customers? I guess not. So I quickly ran a test. Tried to call my cell phone from Skype using my Skype credit. And guess what I see:

What does this mean? I have $4.29 Million Dollars of Skype Credit, but I need more to call my cell?

By now it must be obvious to you that this was a stupid front-end bug. When I logged into their site to check what was my real credit, I discovered:

Interesting, my real credit is $-0.05, which is being displayed as $4,294,967.50 in their UI. What is going on?

Well, turns out their UI developer made an assumption that Skype credit can’t be negative, so the developer  decided to use 32-bit unsigned integers to represent Skype Credit. While the backend actually uses 32-bit signed integers. So -0.05 is getting displayed as 4294967.50.

Damn it! My Skype Credit is $-0.05, now I’m going into a depression.