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Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ddos-ing-yourself dept.

brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.

4 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Skype did not blame Microsoft by wompa · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am not a MS fanboy but it needs to be pointed out that Skype blamed a flaw in their self-healing algorithm that was highlighted by patch Tuesday. They took responsibility.

  2. Skype Blames Skype for Outage by gorbachev · · Score: 5, Informative
    The minute I saw the headlines on some of the blogs about this, I KNEW it'd be on Slashdot with the same misleading headline.

    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.

    The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype.


    That's what Skype says. Doesn't sound like they're blaming anyone but themselves.
    --
    In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
  3. Re:Yeah........ by Ucklak · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's when the patches occurred.

    I had to leave town and usually leave Thunderbird up and running to filter my mail on my IMAP account so my laptop syncs without having to redo all the filters I have in place. After no reboot on Tuesday I was relieved that I wouldn't have an issue with a down T-bird unless the power went out - which never happens unless I leave town (happened only once before).
    Sure enough, none of my mail is filtered after Thursday. Come home this morning and see "Your computer has been recently updated" balloon.

    --
    if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
  4. Re:P2P dumbness by fasuin · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's exaclty what skype does. All voice (video/chat/file) flows are encrypted, and they go from you to your party. Only if both of you are behind a NAT or/and firewall, then skype routes the call through another node. If you want more infos, have a look at "Revealing Skype Traffic: when randomness plays with you" and references therein... http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/drupal/?q=node/245