Internet phone service Skype was today racing to fix a technical glitch that is thought to have left millions of users unable to log in.
The embarrassing setback comes just two weeks after Microsoft bought the firm for £5.2billion, prompting claims the outage was caused by efforts to integrate systems.
It first affected users yesterday afternoon and this morning subscribers were still complaining that they couldn?t sign in.
Yesterday Skype claimed the problems affected only a ?small number? of its more than 660million users.
But the fact that its website was also briefly taken offline suggests that the number of subscribers failing to sign has in run into millions.
Messages about the disruption have appeared from several countries on Twitter.
This morning an American user, ocrapitsj, tweeted: ?What's Happening? SKYPE IS NOT WORKING!?
Jamie Barton, from North East England, added: ?It just quits on open. What a load of junk.'
And New Yorker MidnightHerald posted the comment: ?Had an interview scheduled via Skype this morning. What do I wake up to? A veritable skypocalypse.?
Problems were first reported yesterday afternoon.
On its own Twitter account, at 1.30pm, Skype officials wrote: ?Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype and making calls.?
Eventually, almost 12 hours later, Skype posted a solution for Windows users by going to the website:
http://bit.ly/jwUhAx.
The firm, based in Luxemborg, also issued a temporary manual fix for the problem that involved deleting a file call ?shared.xml? from the its programme folder.
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