NEW YORK (Reuters) - Internet phone service provider Skype said early on Friday users continued to face problems logging onto the service as it struggled to fix the problem.

As of 12:32 a.m. EDT Skype, owned by eBay Inc, said on its Web site that the problem, which it had earlier linked to a software problem, was yet to be resolved.

Skype did not say how many of its users were affected, and could not immediately be reached for comment.

A Skype posting on its "Heartbeat Blog" said the company was "seeing signs of improvement in our sign-on performance" as of 02:00 a.m. EDT but that it was too early to say if the problem was close to being fixed.

About 220 million users, including small business owners, have been affected by the outage, according to a report in the New York Times on Thursday.
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