As reported by the Wall Street Journal, for the first time in Microsoft’s history, it has proposed to buy internet telephone service Skype. And this 8.5 billion US dollars (£5 billion) worth acquisition is likely to close today itself.

In a recent blog post, Mozilla said that it has barred a Skype extension for Firefox because the extension allegedly not only slowed page-load times dramatically, but also happened to be the cause of 40,000 browser crashes a week.

In a Thursday announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Skype revealed that it has acquired Qik - a videoconferencing firm that specializes in the capture and management of video chats.

Skype's Thursday-released update to its free iPhone application brings on video-calling capability to the iPhone 3GS; the iPhone 4; and the present, fourth-generation, version of the iPod touch. The update also enables third-generation iPod touch models and iPads to receive video calls.

According to a recent blog post by Skype, the notably long period of outage that the company witnessed last week was a result of overloaded servers which triggered a bug in the most widely-used version of the Windows Skype client.

A support document published Friday, and then quickly removed, by the VoIP provider Skype from its official site clearly hinted at voice calling on Apple's iPhone, similar to iPad's native app called FaceTime; as well as a mythical Verizon iPhone.

In an attempt to apologize to its users for the Wednesday outage of its VoIP service, Skype has decided to offer compensation to its paying customers who could not make calls during the notably long shutdown of the service.

Ever since the outage, the users of Skype's VoIP service faced problems, which continued well past 48 hours, in logging in to the service.

With Skype's Wednesday outage lasting over almost 30 hours and affecting users with certain version Skype versions, the Luxembourg-based company has decided to offer refunds to all its paying customers - comprising nearly 1.4 percent of the total 560 million users - who were unable to the access the service during the outage.

According to reports, the Wednesday outage of service of the Internet telephony giant, Skype, affected millions of users who could not make calls using the service. As per the company, the outage resulted from some problem in the peer-to-peer interconnection system.

Skype has finally dropped in for Mac users, the Skype 5.0 beta now can be accessed in OS X.