Voice and video over internet giant Skype, which was acquired last month by Microsoft for US$8.5bn, has suffered a mysterious outage which it says is affecting only a small number of its 600m users.
“A configuration problem has meant that some of you have been disconnected from Skype,” Skype spokesman Peter Parkes said on the company website.
“We’ve identified the cause of the problem, and have begun to address it. If you’ve been affected, you should start to see improvement in the next hour or so.
“You shouldn’t need to manually sign back in to Skype – it should reconnect automatically when it’s able to do so. We apologise for the disruption to your conversations,” Parkes said.
A serious part of the internet’s ecosystem
The problem comes just a week after there were problems in the UK ringing online numbers.
Skype is a serious part of the internet’s ecosystem and around the world more than 600m people use the service to make free or inexpensive voice or video calls.
Last month, Microsoft paid US$8.5bn to buy the company, which was founded in 2003 in Sweden by Niklas Zennström and his business partner Janus Friis.
