This seems pretty big - a lot of people rely on skype pretty heavily - I know I use it for a lot of voice calls, chat, and the podcasts. But it's offline today:

Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience. Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.

12-24 hours is a huge outage - imagine the outcry if your local phone service dropped that way, and it wasn't due to a weather emergency that took out the lines. VOIP systems aren't (yet) ready to replace copper, it seems.

Technorati Tags: voip, skype