Millions of Skype Internet phone users worldwide couldn't make calls — or were dropped in mid-conversation — because of a network connection failure that began about noon on the East Coast, Wednesday.
It marked the second time this year that the popular, low-cost calling service was hit with a major outage, and this one was more widespread than the two-day disruption in 2007.
Skype tried to reach its customers through its official blog and messages on the micro-blogging service Twitter.
"Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype — we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations," Skype said on its Twitter account. "Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal — thanks for your continued patience."
In a blog post, Skype said it first noticed a problem when the number of people on the website dropped off. It "wasn't typical or expected, so we began to investigate," it said.
"Skype isn't a network like a conventional phone or IM network — instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running," the post said. "Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline."
The exact cause of the problem is yet to be identified. Bates said "all avenues" were being explored. As a peer-to-peer based service with a distributed architecture a software glitch rather than hostile attack remains the most probable explanation for the problem, if past experience is any guide.
They problem is still being worked on Thursday morning.