Skype Outage Blamed on Windows Update
Skype Outage Blamed on Windows Update
August 21, 2007: The communication problems that plagued Skype last week have officially put down to a bug in the company’s system recovery code coupled with Microsoft’s patch Tuesday software updates.
In a post titled "What happened on August 16" on the company's official Heartbeat blog, Villu Arak has come forward with more information about last weeks extended Skype service outage, claiming that Thursday the 16th’s critical problems were triggered by “a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe”.
Arak says that these machines restarted after receiving a routing set of patches from Microsoft’s Windows Update, and due to the extremely high amount of simultaneous reboots, Skype’s service received a flood of log-in requests which, “combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”
Arak adds that Skype’s peer-to-peer network can normally self-heal, however, with so many restarts happening at the same time, the bug within its network resource allocation algorithm hamstrung this ability.
The firm says the issue has been identified and addressed, and in response to some rumours that the outage was caused by a malicious attack Arak says that “We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.”
Microsoft’s patch Tuesday often includes substantial updates to its operating system code that make rebooting mandatory. It is not currently known whether this has caused Skype service hiccups in the past, however, the firm claims that last week’s outage was unprecedented and it is working to resolve the issue.
“It’s been a very hectic few days around Skype but I am really pleased to say that since the early hours of Saturday morning Skype has been back to normal,” writes Skype CEO Niklas Zennström on the company’s website. “We’re very sorry that Skype was unavailable because we know how much people enjoy using it. But we’re back now and we’re stronger.”
Comment on this story