Skype outage knocks service offline for millions

A portion of Skype users found themselves without service Tuesday after a configuration problem caused the VoIP provider's systems to crash. A message to Heartbeat, Skype's status page, indicated that the company was aware of the problem and was working to fix it.

The most recent update indicates that the problem has been "stabilized" and most should be able to log back in shortly. "You shouldn't need to manually sign back in to Skype - it should reconnect automatically when it's able to do so," Skype's Peter Parkes said in an update.

The issue seems to have affected about a quarter of all users on the service on Tuesday. For most, the outage was not much longer than an hour, which pales in comparison to some other notable outages for the VoIP service.

One of those occurred in December of last year, when Skype was down for about 24 hours. A two day outage occurred in 2007, which was later blamed on an errant client update.

It is not known if Tuesday's outage dealing with the "configuration problem" may have been a result of another bad-behaving update. But don't go blaming Microsoft, the company still has no control over Skype following its $8.5 billion acquisition last month.