Washington: EBay, online auction giant has declared that it is replacing the creator and chief executive of its Skype online telephone arm and would take a charge of 1.43 billion dollars two years after buying the company.

, who established Skype in 2003 in cooperation with Janus Friis and sold it to eBay for 2.6 billion dollars, is quitting as the company’s CEO to become non-executive chairman of the company’s board of directors.

EBay said that Zennstrom will be temporarily substituted as CEO by Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, while the company is in search of a new leader.

In he meantime, Henry Gomez, Skype president will come back to eBay as senior vice president of business affairs. His replacement was not named.

EBay told that it would be filing 1.43 billion dollars as an "impairment charge" in its third quarter financial results, advising that its anticipations had not panned out from the 2005 buyout of Skype while its online telephony business took off all through the world.

The personnel change comes six weeks after Skype’s global network shut down due to what it called a massive restart of users' computers in a short timeframe as they re-booted after updating their Windows programs.

The massive restart and subsequent attempts to log on overwhelmed Skype’s network, shutting it down.