Skype Says Rebooting Users Caused the Outage

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Over on the Skype blog, they say they have narrowed down the last Thursday and Friday’s problems to users rebooting because of the Microsoft updates on Tuesday.

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. Source: Heartbeat

We Say: What? So, no one updated their computers until Thursday and rebooted? Does this make sense to anyone? As soon as the updates were done up popped the screen wanting you to reboot, did everyone wait until Thursday to do it? And there have been many updates in the past that did the damn automatic reboot, I have come back from lunch a couple times to a computer that rebooted because I wasn’t there to stop it, what about all of those times, why did Skype not have this problem those days, or any other patch Tuesday? I believe the default update time in the Windows Update settings are 3am, did everyone set their computer to update 48 hours later?