According to a release late last night Skype has announced that the service is back up and running as normal. “Hello friends, Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal,” said a press release posted on the Skype site at about 11 am GMT. This marks the end of an outage that lasted over 48 hours and affected millions of users of the VoIP phone service.

Skype, a division of eBay, says that the sign-on problems have been taken care of but the Skype presence and chat may take a little bit longer. The release stated that they will provide more details on the cause of the outage on Monday, but have only said up to this point that it was a “deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software”, and have denied rumors of the outage being the result of any type of malicious attack on the service.

Still, according to multiple entries in online chats and forums the outage seems to have shaken the confidence of many current and potential users of the Skype who will now be less likely to build their business with processes and infrastructures dependent on the service.