• USA Today, Thursday, December 23, 2010 1:02 PM

A technical glitch cut off millions of Skype users from friends and loved ones on Wednesday. The Internet-phone service, which was still experiencing user issues on Thursday, is obviously feeling the pressure of increased usage over the holidays. "Some Skype features may not work as reliably as usual," notes USA Today.

"Users' online status may be slow to update, and instant messages might not be delivered as quickly as normal." Meanwhile, the outage will likely put additional pressure on Skype as it prepares to go public. The VoIP provider filed to go public in August, but is also rumored to be considering an acquisition by Cisco and even Facebook. According to TeleGeography Research, Skype accounted for 12% of the world's international calling minutes in '09 -- a 50% increase over 2008 when it accounted for 8% of international calling. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2009, Skype had 560 million registered users, according to the company's chief technology strategist, Jonathan Rosenberg.

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