Skype blames Patch Tuesday PC reboots for outage
Skype is blaming last week’s two-day outage on millions of Windows machines restarting after the installation of Microsoft’s security patches.
The massive number of reboots caused a flood of log-in requests (the Skype default is to login at reboot), causing “a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”
In a note posted on the Skype home page, the eBay-owned company that the peer-to-peer network that powers the Internet phone service has a self-healing component that failed because of a software bug.
[This] event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.
The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.
The Windows Update explanation seems a bit bizarre. After all, Microsoft has been delivering automatic updates (and simultaneous reboots) every month since 2003. Something still isn’t adding up.
Would recommend you look at the positive side of each issue. Does not matter who comes first or next. What matters is looking at similar places for identical topics :D
I was JUST about to post a similar comment in the Skype hysteria thread.
Sigh - I always seem to come in second and a day late at that! :P
From Times Online
August 20, 2007
Skype blames outage on user reboot
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2292536.ece