The highly popular VOIP chat service Skype has suffered a worldwide outage prompting millions to turn to Twitter and Facebook to vent their frustration.

While the world turned the heat up when Google had several high profile outages earlier in 2010 and 2009 with their gmail service, Skype is rarely off the air and today s outage would seem to be a major technical issue facing the Luxembourg based company.

Skype has become a vital service for international communication and offers free calls through computers using VOIP technology. Film editors use skype as it allows multiple users to work on projects simultaneously using a share screen function.

When will Skype be back on the air?

While skype has not officially announced a time when the service will be back up, it would appear that the company is working flat out to restore it as soon as possible.

Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal thanks for your continued patience -  Twitter