Skype Is Down, Cause Under Investigation [Update: Fix!]

The number of people that use Skype to communicate with friends, family and co-workers is huge. The VOIP service has been around for a long time and is one of the most popular services of the type out there. The last time we talked about Skype was when the company was being eyed for purchase by Google and Microsoft. Microsoft eventually purchased Skype and Google is known to have been in the running before backing away from the deal.

If you are a big fan of Skype and use it a lot you may find this morning that the service is down. A tweet from Skype was spied a bit before 7 a.m. central this morning that warned users were having issues signing into the service. You can see the tweet above. It's clear that Skype isn't sure what the problem is right not, but an investigation is underway.

With the hack on the Sony PSN fresh in many minds, the initial fear from users may be that a hack caused the outage. Skype has promised to share details of what caused the outage as soon as they have them. At this point, there is no indication that a hack caused the service to go down.

UPDATE: Skype offers instructions on fixing the sign-in issue for Vista, XP, and OS X here. Let us know if the fix works in the comments.

[via Twitter]