Major Skype Outage In Progress

Skype has confirmed it is having software problems on its network, resulting in a lack of connectivity for millions of Skype users. Many users cannot currently authenticate to Skype, rendering all voice, chat, and voicemail services effectively offline. Some users appear to be unaffected, having authenticated before the problems began last night.
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At 2PM GMT (9AM ET, 6AM PT) Skype announced that its engineering team had discovered a software issue that is expected to be resolved "within 12 to 24 hours." The original entry, which has been removed, read: "Due to peer-to-peer network issues there are problems with Skype login. This issue is being investigated. We will give new updates when the issue has been resolved. We apologise for any inconvenience." Skype has pulled its client downloads from the site until the problem is fixed.

Skypeophiles here at Ars tell us that some users are showing up on contact lists already, but they are nonetheless having problems connecting to them for voice or text chat. A chat message I sent to one user arrived after 30 minutes, and we could both "see each other" as being "online" on our contacts list, even though we weren't.

Skype's recommendation is that you leave your client running, so that it can authenticate to the service once it returns to normal.
Oh, you fickle VOIP (?)

What makes this Skype outage surprising is how often it doesn't happen. This is the most significant outage for the service in years, yet we already foresee scores of headlines trumpeting the flaws of VOIP communications based on this outage alone. That's unfortunate because we think Skype network performance has been spectacular on average, given that it's free and heavily used. In fact, it would appear that the Skype P2P network is indeed in fine shape, it's just that the authentication system (which authenticates but also provides location services for routing purposes) is hosed.

On the other hand, for the first time in many, many weeks, I'll be forced to use a real telephone for business as opposed to Skype. It's like traveling back in time to be with Alexander Graham Bell. Or not.

When we learn more about the cause, we'll update here.