Skype goes down for the count

Can't log into Skype? You're not the only one.

Millions of Skype users around the globe found themselves unable to log onto the chat service Wednesday, with Skype acknowledging in a tweet that "some of you may be having problems signing in." No kidding.

"Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal," read a follow-up tweet. "Thanks for your continued patience."

The first complaints about Wednesday's Skype outage came early in the morning, and by 1:30 p.m. ET, many users — including me — had been bounced out of the service and remained unable to log back in.

Even Skype's website was barely loading Wednesday, a likely sign that the site is being swamped by users looking for an explanation for the spotty Skype service.

Indeed, The Next Web points to an online note from someone who appears to be a Skype engineer, who writes that Wednesday's outage is "pretty bad."

Meanwhile, droves of silenced Skype users took to Twitter - where else? - to complain.

The latest Skype outage comes about two weeks after Tumblr, the popular microblogging site, went down for a full 24 hours.

Skype itself is no stranger to outages, of course, including the infamous 2007 system failure that brought Skype to its knees for two days. Skype blamed that outage on millions of Skype-connected PCs restarting in unison after Microsoft issued an unusually large batch of Windows security patches. Oops.

So, are you having any luck with Skype, or are you locked out like the rest of us?

Update (2:10 p.m.): A post on the official Skype blog blames the outage on "a problem affecting some versions of Skype" that's disrupting Skype's so-called "supernodes," which help direct Skype traffic. A fix is coming, Skype blogger Peter Parkes writes, but it could take a "few hours" before service returns to normal.

Update 2 (3:30 p.m.): A new tweet from Skype says that service is "gradually returning to normal," but cautions that users may not be able to log in for "several hours." Indeed, I still can't log in myself. If you're having luck, let us know.

Update 3 (5:30 p.m.): While some report that they've managed to log back into Skype, many others—including me—are still locked out. In the meantime, check out this dramatic chart, which shows what 21.7 million users getting kicked off Skype in a matter of hours looks like.