Skype that service was down, at least for users who weren't already signed in. "Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype - we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations," the company wrote Wednesday afternoon.

Skype then added the following: "Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal - thanks for your continued patience."

that the Skype outage affected at least 10 million users, but was limited to people who weren't already signed into the service. "If you're already signed in, you should be able to continue using Skype as normal," spokesman Peter Parkes said.

As , although Skype is a peer-to-peer service, and therefore shouldn't go down on a grand scale, the service relies on a huge infrastructure for authentication and linking to traditional phone networks. That an outage can affect so many users of a major Internet communications service is troubling.

At the time of this posting, that the service is returning to normal--though they expect it will take several hours for everyone to be able to sign in again.