UPDATE: Skype has announced that it is “gradually returning to normal” as of Wednesday, Dec. 22 at 10 p.m. EST.
Skype, the popular Internet phone and instant messaging program, seems to be down for millions of users as of Wednesday morning.
As users lose their ability to communicate through Skype, they are turning to Twitter by the thousands to tweet about it:
“Skype is down. God help us all,” tweeted user @coribald at 12:45 p.m. EST.
“Skype is down! R.I.P.,” tweeted another user, @EmiliWansley.
Skype joined the conversation and notified fellow Twitter users that it is investigating the cause of the outage.
“Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype—we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations,” Skype Inc. tweeted via its official twitter account, user @Skype.
“Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal – thanks for your continued patience.”
At peak times, Skype has up to 23 million users online from around the world, according to Skype’s website. Yet at 1 p.m. EST, only 6.2 million users are on Skype, as seen from a New York City IP address.
Founded in 2003, Skype has become increasingly popular for enabling its users to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages, and share files with other users. Some users also use Skype to make low-rate calls to landlines and mobile phones.
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