I hadn’t read much about the Skype outage, but I did catch a quick bit that their stock price took a big hit.

Then today, I caught a post on Wired’s Epicenter blog titled “Skype: Microsoft Patches Were ‘Catalyst’ Not ‘Root Cause’ for Outage“. I thought this was going to be a case where a patch caused a problem in Skype’s back-end servers, which took the network down.

It wasn’t.

In “What happened on August 16” on the Skype Blog, Villu Arak explains that:

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.

Of course I’m not happy that Skype had a problem, but I bet that the Microsoft Update Team is happy to hear that they were the cause. If nothing else, this goes to show that a whole lot of computers are now set to automatically download and install critical updates as they become available. Maybe we can start whittling away at the bot-nets.

More Reading:

“The Microsoft connection clarified” – Skype Blog

“Skype: Microsoft zombie network launched DoS attack” – Skype-Watch.com

“Microsoft Update Caused the Great Skype Outage” – Blog Nation

Posted in Microsoft, Outages, Skype, Tech-News 3 Comments »