Raising speculation of a DDoS attack, a hacking group has claimed responsibility for a spate of connectivity issues plaguing Skype this week.

In a post on Twittter, hacking group CyberTeam has claimed responsibility for a Skype outage that saw users affected in a number of Asian countries including Japan, Singapore and India alongside countries across Europe.

The outage first began on Monday and users took to complain about connectivity issues going into Wednesday.

In a blog statement, Skype said:

We are aware of an incident where users will either lose connectivity to the application or may be unable to send or receive messages. Some users will be unable to see a black bar that indicates them that a group call is ongoing, and longer delays in adding users to their buddy list.

That post was later updated on Tuesday, with Skype’s Jagadish Harihara pointing to “some configuration corrections” to mitigate the impact of the outage.

Meanwhile, a hacker group going by the name “CyberTeam” has taken responsibility for the downtime with some reports pointing to a DDoS attack targeting the service.

The tweet read:

A second tweet followed, with the self-professed ‘specialist in ddos attacks’ marking it next target in Steam, the popular online gaming marketplace and platform which sees tens of millions of active users.

Furthermore, the hacking group stated it would be “more ‘aggressive’ than LizardSquad’, the infamous hacking group which has previously struck the PlayStation and XBOX Live gaming networks during the holidays over multiple years.

Speaking to the BBC, cybersecurity researcher at the University College London, Dr. Steven Murdoch, underlined the threat of DDoS strikes, a continuing and commonly found menace of cyberattacks.

He stated:

DDoS attacks are some of the most common approaches for taking down networks. Skype have not publicly gone into detail about what is happening, but the disruption we’re seeing could certainly be explained by a DDoS attack amongst other possibilities.

Image credit: Flickr.