Skype goes down again

Skype has gone down for the second time in a matter of a couple of weeks. The VoIP service provider confirmed this on its Twitter account this morning, saying it was working to address the issue.

"A small number of you may have problems signing in to Skype," the company wrote on its Twitter page today. "We're investigating the cause, and hope to have more details to share soon."

However, Skype users on Twitter are not quite so sure about the "small number" that have been affected. According to one Twitter user, he and all his friends had the problem while another in a more sarcastic tone said the small number was really meant "all of us."

Though exactly how widespread the issue is at the moment, is not known, but typically people who are affected cannot connect to Skype. When they try to log in, the service says ''Connecting'' but people never get to log into the programme.

The trouble today comes after an outage that occurred in late May, when Skype acknowledged that some users were not able to place calls or even sign in to the service.

Skype came out with a fix (by deleting a "shared.xml" file) for the issue, which affected Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users. In December, the service went down across the world following an outage which Skype blamed on issues with "a large number of supernodes" that did not allow users to place calls.

Skype's outages are coming at a time when it is in transition following an acquisition deal with Microsoft. The software giant announced plans to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion.

With the closing of the deal later this year, Skype would become a division of Microsoft under the supervision of its current CEO Tony Bates. According to Microsoft it planned to integrate Skype into its Kinect motion-gaming peripheral, Windows Phone 7, and other platforms.