An outage at the popular Internet phone service Skype has affected millions of people around the world, with users from Japan, Europe and the US reporting problems.
People have reported of calls coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle, as well as they said they are unable to log into the service and that the programme is crashing across all platforms.
Skype chief executive officer Tony Bates told BBC News that they take outages like this really seriously and apologise to users for the inconvenience.
He confirmed that the company is investigating the cause of the problem and teams are working hard to find a solution for the problem.
Estimating that due to the outage Skype has lost around 10 million calls, Bates did not rule in or rule out the possibility of a malicious attack.
Gigaom.com website editor Om Malik was quoted by BBC News as saying that Skype is one of the key applications of the modern web and is already a hit with consumers, and over the past few years it has become part of the economic fabric for startups and small businesses around the world.
"The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business," Malik added.
