"Right now it looks like clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls. We are deep in the middle of investigating the cause of the problem and have teams working hard to remedy the situation.
Although Mr Bates did not rule out the possibility that Skype had been the victim of a cyber attack a spokesman said that the problem was not related to the hacking attacks that disabled websites such as Mastercard and Visa in recent weeks.
In a blog post, Skype explained that computers known as "supernodes" had been taken offline by an unspecified problem affecting some versions of Skype.
"Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available," Skype said. "Our engineers are creating new 'mega-supernodes' as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal."
Last night the company said it was still "100 per cent focused on getting Skype back in action" but admitted that some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal.
Skype, which was founded in 2003, bypasses the standard telephone network by channelling voice, video and text conversations over the internet.
WIth free computer-to-computer calls, it is particularly popular around Christmas as it allows families hundreds of miles apart to share the experience of celebrating and opening presents.
However Skype is also aiming at the business market.
The company announced plans in August to raise up to $100m in shares by listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Technology blogger Om Malik, writing on his blog GigaOm.com, said the outage was a serious issue for a company that is "starting to ask larger corporations for their business."
"If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage," Malik said, adding that Skype "needs to ensure that it doesn't go down. Even for a few minutes."
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