Skype experiences global outage

Popular voice chat and IM client Skype has been down for a large portion of Wednesday morning, leaving users unable to connect to their peers.

At about 1pm EST, Skype's official Twitter account said, "Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal -- thanks for your continued patience."

Individual reports vary, with some users reporting the ability to connect to the service on their mobile devices, but with no buddies showing up on their contact lists, with still others reporting a total inability to launch the Skype client without it crashing.

Users of Skype on all platforms are reporting trouble, and it looks to be affecting millions of users. The company has not given a projection for when it expects to have the problem remedied, but the issue does not affect all users of the popular service.

UPDATE Skype's Peter Parkes has put up a blog entry Wednesday afternoon attributing the outage to a software error on several of Skype's "supernodes," which are essentially peer-to-peer intermediaries.

"Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available," Parkes said. "Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some..."