A new blame game is about to start, with Skype announcing that Microsoft Windows update was the reason for the skype outage of the weekend . Quoting few lines of the article which was posted at one of the Skype blogs earlier this day :
On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused 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.
Even though these few words of blame on Microsoft update could make you feel like peeling the skin of hair, but could be seriously taken by Microsoft. Guys at Skype has done extensive research and finally claimed that there are no signs of any malicious activity which resulted this outage, and, hence user’s security are not at risk.
Quoting the article again
Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, 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.
Hey guys so be careful, Microsoft patch level updates can be vulnerable for your system 
. Do you agree that a microsoft patch level update can cause such a huge outage in such a popular service which now has crossed billions of users. Well, lets see what Microsoft has to say about this !! but yeah, we bloggers must learn some lessons with this !! Thanks tipsosaurus !!!
Do share your views with comments about your views on such claims by Skype ?? As for me , I seriously doubt this claim !!
Please note : skype is blocked in UAE, hence if you are visiting this blog at UAE , you can use this link to access the article 
. Alternatively you can learn some tricks to unblock websites here
via : gizmodo
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There are two sides of this news…
the first side : well well! I couldn’t have imagined any lame answer from a company like ebay. I trust their blame but does that blame allows them to stay away from doing good job ? No, I don’t think so.
But, if we look at the brighter side of the story then its good that they did good research and then explained the root cause of the problem and have done work to get it fixed too, so that in future nothing of that sort happens again.
And, because I’ve got that positive energy flowing all around me…so I always tend to look at the brighter side
If we look at exactly what they have seen - from a technical side, (I do not belive I am saying this), Microsoft is not at blame for this. The root cause was the fact that there was a huge number of login requests. That was the root cause. Why the users had to restart? That can be associated to many cases - in this particular case, it was a patch update by Microsoft.
From what I understand from the quote, the same downtime would have been caused if it were for some other reason that the users did a ‘mass login’.
@tipsosauras yeah they did a good research, and it was good that they identified the bug. Well , they are just trying to cover their mistake by pointing on microsoft. And yeah we should always look towards the brighter side
@vyoma I seriously doubt the mass login could have created the problem, coz there are millions of skype users and it must be quite common for mass login of thousands of user at a particular moment
Well, I am not sure what happened. But it is Skype that said “disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe”. And that is attributed to Microsoft’s patch release.
Assuming their analysis it true - would mean that the disruption would have triggered by any occurance of massive restart of users’s computers - for any reason. That was the point.
@vyoma , thanks for pointing that out. I think i missed that sentence. Sorry for that
.
Windows update created the massive restart of the computers in skype network which are 1000s in number. Normally when a windows update is installed, it automatically restarts the machine. Hence , when microsoft’s automatic update took place in skype’s computer network, it restarted all the systems disconneting the users. Finally after the system reboot , massive login requests popped up some bug in skype service which ultimately prevented users all over the world from logging in.
Quite possible, it crossed the threshold of the number of user login request which skype system can handle .
Once again thanks vyoma for correcting me
Mayank (Tipsosaurus) knows better that I am kind of Microsoft-hater. But I blame them only where they deserve.
@vyoma .. hmm microsoft-hater, but why ?? does this give a hint that you are for open-source
? Which OS do you use ?
I shifted to Ubuntu recently, but I need to keep the Windows Vista on my laptop to do some office work. Ubuntu for most other stuff.
@vyoma , hmm .. hearing a lot about ubuntu, think i need to try it out
. You got nice blogs . Keep up the good work 
.
Thank you, Kanak.
Welcome vyoma