Skype is a peer to peer internet telephony application that exploded onto the scene several years ago and was purchased in 2005 by eBay. The software allows members to talk to each other anywhere in the world for free and allows you to call people outside the Skype network for considerably less than other communication services.

Skype has deferred questions about its outages to its blog where Skype engineers have been posting information regarding the problem. According to the blog, they performed maintenance two days ago to the company’s billing system and a deficiency in an algorithm that controls interaction between Skype’s users has resulted in the inability login.