(InfoWorld) - Some?30 hours after the problem erupted, eBay's Skype engineers continue to work to fully restore this extremely popular Internet telephony and instant messaging service, while many business users deal with work disruptions.

Although?steady progress has been made throughout the day Friday, the problem, which has affected millions of Skype users, hasn't been fully fixed, a Skype spokeswoman said at around 9 p.m. GMT. Skype plans to provide an official update on the situation later on Friday, she said.

The widespread software problem, which centers on the system's ability to log users into the service, has particularly stung people who use Skype for business. Skype estimates that about 30 percent of its users employ Skype as a work-related communications tool.

"The outage has had quite a profound effect on my working day and has meant spending time setting up other chat clients and networking with colleagues via alternative means," Michael Pick, a freelance blogger and social media consultant,?said Friday.

Based in Japan, Pick works from home and has clients and colleagues all over the world, many of whom also work from their homes. "I guess that might make us a particularly dependent group on Skype," he wrote.

Skype is his virtual work communications hub for text chats, file sharing, and voice calls. "In the average day there is very little time that Skype isn't on in the background, and I use it extensively to speak to clients and colleagues scattered all over the world," he wrote.

In addition to the basic, free Skype services, Pick also pays for additional Skype telephony services. He feels Skype could have handled this situation better from a support and communications perspective. "For a so-called Web 2.0 service, communication is key, and I can imagine that Skype may well have lost quite a few supporters in favor of some of the other VoIP services today," he wrote.

Thomas Vander Wal, a social Web advisor and consultant who runs a one-man company called InfoCloud Solutions in Bethesda, Maryland, uses Skype as his primary communication channel for about half of his customers.

"When customers buy a day of my time and I am not meeting face to face, Skype is often my primary means of communicating as I can connect to a client with voice and/or video and leave it running for the day. It is like having a tunnel into their offices with them seeing or hearing me working on their issues," he?said Friday.

Luckily for him, he hadn't scheduled any such engagement during the time of the outage. "I use Skype 2 or 3 days a week, and it hit at a time where it didn't impact me," he wrote.

Much more stressed out about the outage is Stefan Topfer, CEO and chairman of Winweb International in London, which offers Skype as part of a suite of services for small businesses.

Winweb has about 250,000 registered users, so the company's customer support lines have been ringing off the hook inquiring about Skype.

At the time of his phone interview with IDG News Service on Friday, more than 8 hours had passed since Skype had last provided an official update about the situation, and Topfer was livid about this.

"That's a whole business day. That's quite unacceptable. I'm quite upset about it," Topfer said. He had been unsuccessfully trying to contact his company's main Skype contact since the beginning of the outage on Thursday.

Once the service is restored and Skype explains to him what happened, he'll decide whether to stick with Skype or seek other options.

"My masters are my clients, and I have to provide them with a good service. This outage is going to impact my business, no question about it," Topfer said. "The most stunning thing of all is really the way this customer care has been handled."

For Pick, the situation has been a learning experience in several ways. For example, free of the real-time communication distractions from Skype, "I have managed to get a lot more done in terms of writing work," he wrote. And the situation has made it clear that it's never good to depend too much on a single service, company or tool, which, he now realizes, can be "a potentially hazardous career move."

At press time -- 10:40 p.m. GMT -- Skype hadn't yet provided an update on the problem. The latest official message from Skype remained the one posted at 11 a.m. GMT on its Heartbeat blog.

Skype has about 220 million registered users worldwide. At peak times, it has an average of 9 million concurrent users on its network, the Skype spokeswoman said.