Skype apologises for losing half of daily call traffic

"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:

EN-US;mso-fareast-language:RU;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA"><a href="http://www.inform.kz" rel="nofollow">Kazinform</a> refers to BBC News.

Users as far afield as Japan, Europe and the US have all reported problems.

The company which prides itself on providing relatively reliable service last suffered a major outage in 2007.

"We take outages like this really seriously and apologise for the inconvenience users are having," Tony Bates, Skype chief executive officer told BBC News.

"Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation," Mr Bates said.

On Skype's Twitter account, the company said their "engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal".

The news blog ReadWriteWeb said they have monitored complaints from users who reported that they are unable to log into the service and that the programme is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC; Kazinform cites BBC News.

See www.bbc.co.uk for full version