On Monday Ebay admitted defeat with regard to its Skype investment, writing down the value of its investment by US$ 1.43 billion - nearly 50 percent.

According to the Financial Times, co-founder Niklas Zennstrom of Skype also left his position as CEO.

Ebay purchased Skype two years ago for an agreed-upon US$ 2.6 billion.

Standard & Poor's Scott Kessler points back to the initial acquisition, observing that "At the time, we thought strategically it didn’t make a lot of sense and the price seemed excessive."

Last month Skype went down for over 24 hours, an event that the company attributed to software troubles.

While Ebay did not forthrightly explain in what ways Skype failed to meet company goals, it's perceived that Skype "failed to produce the sort of e-commerce and advertising revenues that Ebay had hoped," writes the Financial Times.

Ebay has stated it has no plans to sell the business.

Skype is among the most successful of a series of ventures undertaken by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, whose projects also included Kazaa, a P2P music service, and Joost, the online neo-TV solution that went public yesterday.