Skype having technical problems; calls dropping

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Skype service was suffering technical problems on Wednesday, intermittently going in and out.

‘Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype -- we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations,’ Skype said on its Twitter account.

The Luxembourg-based company allows users to make voice calls over the Internet. The service has millions of users worldwide.

To ease users’ concerns, Skype later tweeted: ‘Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal -- thanks for your continued patience.’

The company also posted an explanation on its blog to describe what was going on.

‘Earlier today, we noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn’t typical or expected, so we began to investigate,’ the post said. ‘Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network -– instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running … Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline.’

The post urged users to follow Skype’s Twitter account for the latest updates on the situation.

[Updated at 12:45 p.m.: Skype tweeted that the site ‘is now gradually returning to normal -– we expect it may take several hours for everyone to be able to sign in again, however.’]

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-- W.J. Hennigan