Service hasn't crashed, Skype says

Skype's Internet voice service "has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack," the eBay subsidiary said late Thursday after some users were unable to log on for hours.

The eBay Inc. division narrowed down the cause of the problem to "a deficiency in an algorithm in Skype networking software" in its most recent blog posting, posted at 10 p.m. GMT. It earlier had fingered an unspecified software problem. Skype employees around the world were working to fix the problem, the company said.

At about 2 a.m. GMT on Thursday, Skype put up a posting that acknowledged the log-in problem and said it expected to solve the problem within 12 to 24 hours. The latest update was posted about 20 hours later. Downloads of the Skype software had been disabled at that time. Late Thursday in the U.S., it was possible to download the software.

Skype's peer-to-peer Internet service for Internet-based voice calls, messages and video. It's free to use among software clients on PCs and handhelds, and Skype also offers a low-cost service for reaching conventional phones. At the end of June, the service had 220 million registered user accounts, up 94 percent from a year earlier. Skype recently has been trying to address security concerns to appeal to enterprises.

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