Skype goes dark, may be offline until Friday

Skype Ltd. early today blamed an unspecified "software problem" for an outage that might make the voice-over-IP service unavailable for as long as 24 hours.

"Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype," a message on the company's site said. "Our engineering team has determined that it's a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours." The message was posted at 9 a.m. Eastern today. Skype users writing on blogs and message forums, however, have claimed that they have been unable to connect since late yesterday.

Some users have also said it appears the issue is a log-in authentication failure. "Those that are in stay in and those trying to sign in can't get in," said Tom Keating, who maintains a VoIP blog here.