Skype Ltd. is blaming software problems for outages affecting its voice over IP (VOIP) service today.

    A message appearing on the Skype Website this morning confirmed what many users already knew: "Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype."

    The company provided no details into the nature of the problem, except to say its engineering team has traced it to a software issue. Skype's statement also said the company expects the problems to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours.

    In the meantime, the company said downloads of the Skype client have been temporarily disabled while its team works on fixing the problem.

    Skype has about 220 million accounts. While there is no way to tell how many users have been affected by the outage, those who could connect to the service noted that the number of online users hovered around 1 million, compared with an average of 5 million to 6 million concurrent users. (Skype's record for concurrent online users is 9 million, reached in January.)

    Being able to connect to the Skype network today was no guarantee of being able to use its service. According to some reports, while users were able to see active members in their contact lists, in some cases they were not able to connect to them via voice or text chat.