The world's largest Internet auctioneer, eBay Inc., revealed in an SEC filing that it will take $1.4 billion in charges related to the calling service in the third quarter, of which $530 million is an "earn out settlement" that will satisfy eBay's obligations under the purchase agreement.

The company announced that Skype's Chief Executive Officer Niklas Zennström, SVP Strategy/Innovation Janus Friis and VP, Strategic Partners and Corporate Development Geoffrey Prentice, resigned as officers of Skype, and Mr. Zennström became non-executive Chairman of Skype. Current eBay chief strategy officer Michael van Swaajj will take the Skype CEO's chair.

EBay Inc. acquired Skype for a $2.6 billion price tag in 2005. Over the last quarter, Skype's revenues of $90 million accounted for only 5 percent of eBay's total revenues. Skype charges $29.95 for a year's worth of SkypeOut calls, which allows users to make unlimited long-distance calls to any phone number in the US and Canada.

In mid-August this year, a mix of planned and unplanned outages and downtime left many users unable to log on to the service to make phone calls, for a total of around 30 hours. There are more than 200 million registered accounts with Skype.

"Some people have been critical of Skype, but I am very proud of the company’s growth," Zennström told ThomasCrampton.com via phone. "Very few companies can claim to match the growth trajectory Skype is on and continues to be on."

"Some people may want to monetize faster, but the key is to figure out what is the right speed of monetization," Zennström added. "If you act too aggressively, there is a real risk you will lose the huge active user base."

Also, around Sept. 9, a new worm that spreads through Skype's Web-application’s IM feature threatened the integrity of PCs, using a bogus chat message. Both Symantec and FSecure have identified the virus, which has been dubbed W32.Pykspa.D. by Symantec and W32/Skipi.A. by FSecure.

Skype, which was acquired by the auction site eBay, was founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who are also the founders of video site Joost. The program, which uses peer-to-peer technology to connect phone calls, instant messages and videos between its users, became an instant hit after its launch in August 2003. Skype also experienced some connectivity problems in 2005, when the service was down for a few hours, but after that no other major disrupting event was reported until August this year.