Skype, an essential communication tools for millions of individuals and businesses worldwide has been unable to authenticate users during the past 14 hours, rendering the service unusable.

14 hours – and counting. One can scarcely imagine the magnitude of the technical failure that causes such a lengthy outage.

Although Skype offers paid-for, business critical services including inbound geographic number routing and outbound PSTN dialling, they have long – and wisely – avoided any commitment to deliver emergency call services. And you can understand their reluctance to start now.

This event also highlights the challenge of keeping customers informed; a typical Skype user almost nevers dials www.skype.com into their browser, so how to get the word out about the outage and status updates?

Luckily (or not), many major media outlets are covering the issue more than adequately.

Fingers crossed for Skype’s engineers that they can effect a resolution soon.