Skype scrambles to remedy service outage

Skype is warning users to update their systems following a technical glitch which is leaving some unable to log in to the VoIP service. The company has released a new version of its Windows client software to address the error.

"Earlier today, a corruption occured in a small percentage of users' systems that resulted in some of our community not being able to sign in to Skype," the company said in a post to its Heartbeat blog.

In an earlier posting to the Skype blog, the company issued a step-by-step tutorial for remedying the situation. The guide asked users to access the Skype appdata directory via the Windows Run command and delete a file named 'shared.xml'.

After the file has been deleted, users can then restart the service and sign into Skype.

"We issued some instructions which would allow you to get back online, but understand that they're fairly technical, and have been working hard to produce a version of Skype for Windows which fixes this problem automatically," the blog said.

While the outage primarily affects Windows systems, Skype has also recommended that Linux and OS X users having trouble accessing the service use a similar procedure to locate and delete the shared.xml file.

The company said that it is working on an update to address the issue in Mac OS X systems.