If you were hoping to complete your long-distance holiday calls a little early this week, you're out of luck: Skype has been down for most of the day, and more than 20 million users have been kicked off the service.
The company posted to Twitter this morning acknowledging the outage, but hasn't offered very many details about it, and users are furious.
Skype gave an explanation of the outage in a blog post, but in a touch of fitting irony, that post was almost immediately overloaded with traffic and has been offline for nearly two hours.
Apparently, the post blames the outage on failing "supernodes," which are clusters of peer-to-peer connections. A problem in the Skype software apparently took some of these nodes offline, which caused user traffic to decline from more than 23 million to less than 2 million in a matter of hours. Skype's engineers are working on building new "mega-supernodes" to get the service back up.
