ZDNet Australia
17 August 2007 Many Skype users were unable to make calls yesterday after a "software problem" left some callers without a service for at least 14 hours.
The company, a division of online auction company eBay, posted on its Web site that many of its users were "having problems" logging into the free service.
"Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue," according to a Skype blog posting at yesterday afternoon in Europe.
"We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours."
It was not immediately clear how many users were affected, but Skype users in Colombia, Brazil, Germany, Finland and the United States reported difficulties logging on.
Judging from the timing of comments to that posting, some users had been without service for as long as 14 hours.
By 4.30pm, however, an AP reporter was able to log in and reach some Skype users in Europe.
There were 29 posts on the same blog lamenting the lack of connections.
Skype urged users to keep the program running "and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience".
It also temporarily disabled downloads for the program, but said they would be made available "again as quickly as possible".
Skype, was founded by Niklas Zennstroem and Janus Friis, and uses peer-to-peer technology to connect phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users.
It runs on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, PocketPC and Linux.
Besides computer-to-computer calls, Skype users can also use the program to connect to mobile phones and traditional land line telephones.
eBay bought Skype in October 2005 for about US$2.1 billion.
