The first problems regarding Skype’s service outage were reported on Thursday and the company quickly acknowledged on its website that there is a problem.

"Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype," the company wrote on its support blog at about 2 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, or about 10 a.m. Eastern U.S. Daylight time, on Thursday. "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.” it has been posted yesterday on the site.

In order to prevent other problems, Skype Team had disabled also downloads of the program.

But today the situation got better. According to a post on Skype’s official blog , HeartbeatSkype, Skype is on its way back to full power.

“We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day. An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.” reads the post.

Also the post signed by Villu Arak dismissed some of the theories about the possible causes which led to the outbreak.

“Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.” it’s been said on the blog.

In an earlier post Villu Arak blamed an algorithm for Skype’s outage. “This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.” he explained.

So, until an official motive will be announced, let’s admit it was just a software bug.

Or just maybe Skype is reaching out its limits?

Skype, which is acquired by the auction site eBay, was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who are better known as the men behind Kaxaa.

The program, which uses peer-to-peer technology to connect phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users, has became an instant hit after its launch in August 2003.

Since it was acquired by eBay, the program added permanently new features such as Skype Find, Skype Prime, Send Money, which allows users to send money via PayPal from one Skype user to another.

Skype has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the latest version 3.5 was launched earlier this month.

According to the latest data, there are 220 millions Skype users and during a usual day there might be close to 5 or 6 million people connected at any given time.

Since its launch this is the first time when Skype was confronted with such a serious problem and it remains to be seen how fast it will get back to its full capacity.