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Skype Blames Windows Restart for Two Day Network Outage

6:30 am on August 21, 2007 | Category: Software, VoIP, Web Services

The eBay-owned online VoIP service, Skype, gave an explanation yesterday for a prolonged outage late last week, blaming the simultaneous restarting of users’ computers for the glitch.

The following message was posted on the Skype Heartbeat blog…

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 usersâ€™ 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 Skypeâ€™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.

Normally Skypeâ€™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.

Some bloggers have expressed doubt about the â€œofficialâ€ explanation, however, questioning whether an update to Windows could really cause all this trouble.

Regardless of the technical reasons behind it, Skype’s image has been rocked by this much-publicized two-day outage. They have much work to do to regain the complete trust of users, especially those who utilize Skype for business purposes.

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