IP telephony service provider Skype is working frantically to resolve issues with its core network, which have prevented users from logging on since early Thursday.

Skype’s website said that the provider’s engineering team has determined that the problem is a software issue, which is expected to be resolved within 24 hours. That means the service should be back online sometime Friday afternoon, European time.

The company has also temporarily disabled downloads of the Skype client until the issue is fixed.

Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum, said “There have been a few signs in recent months that possibly all is not well with Skype. Numerous people have remarked to me that ‘Skype is getting worse’. The difficulty analysing such problems is that all the evidence is anecdotal and certainly not based on a good statistical sample. That the user base continues to grow suggests that the overall user experience has been good enough, so far.”

But Main notes that telecoms engineering is no different to any other product development and there is always a commercial penalty to pay by compromising reliability or quality. “You still broadly get what you pay for in telecoms.”