Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage

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.

Comments

What kind of fookin' idiots....

[TW Atwater]

...build OSes that have to be rebooted to make changes effective.

What part of Skype's Blog Did You Not Understand?

[twitter]

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.

This is just another example of M$'s poor quality code threatening the stability of network services. No other Software distribution besides Windoze has a monthly patch that requires a restart like this. Sane software distributions make fixes available as soon as they are ready. For marketing and big dumb company reasons, M$ saves them up for a once a month ordeal instead of letting users have things in a timely fashion and chose their time and size of their pain. This problem was significant but is trivial next to threat posed by the 25% of all Windows computers that belong to a botnet.

Sure, there was a problem with Skype's code and Skype admitted to it, but the initiating factor is all M$. That's blame casting and M$ deserves it. The summary mentions the code flaw, so I don't see what your problem besides an outsided love for an incompetent software maker. For anyone to report things differently is to misconstrue things.

Let's look at it another way.

[twitter]

If I were to go to a junction box and use it to turn your computer on and off six or seven times, would you blame me when it would not start or would you blame M$ for not having a journaled file system a binary registry and not enough ability to "self heal"? In this case, why are you blaming Skype?

Re:Let's look at it another way.

[twitter]

NTFS is a journaling file system, and it has been since the early Windows NT days.

Pardon me for not knowing or caring about the exact specification of a trade secret. Let's go to the heavily modified Wiki page on ntfs:

Internally, NTFS uses B+ trees to index file system data. Although complex to implement, this allows faster file open times in most cases. A file system journal is used in order to guarantee the integrity of the file system itself (but not of each individual file).

Without individual file protection, your registry will still be hosed if you suffer the wrong kind of power failure. Let me know when their file system catches up to ext3, Reiser or when they get rid of that stupid and fragile registry.

So, is it my fault or M$'s fault your system is hosed if I flip the switch while you try to power up your mighty NT box?

I like asking that question because it's a no win for M$. If it's my fault your box dies, then M$ is responsible for the Skype meltdown. If it's M$'s fault, you can blame Skype for not being robust enough, but M$ is likewise fragile. It's really rhetorical because I believe both are true. M$ is fragile and shitty and that's what gave Skype a headache.

Re:In other news . . .

[twitter]

the gay, baby polar bears

How do you know that there are gay polar bears?

Re:They rightly blamed M$.

[twitter]

So enlighten us here, why didn't this happen last Patch Tuesday? Or the one before?

You don't take enlightenment very well, dedazo. You already commented in the thread where I linked to articles showing that this was the second biggest patch tuesday in 2007, which would make it one of the biggest ever. M$ has been setting all recent OS to accept these things by default, so each month gets bigger than the last by the number of new XP or Vista machines sold and not replaced with gnu/linux. Other people here have shown that this mega patch had some 50 packages to it. Finally, the people at Skype know what they are talking about and have eaten considerable crow over this so as not to anger M$. I can cast these perls at your feet all day, but pigs like you are happier in shit.

Ah, the AC gets it.

[twitter]

Like anyone with a functioning brain, I'd blame the moron who broke my computer by screwing around with the junction box instead of looking for excuses to blame a third party against whom I've got some schoolboy grudge.

Good work, AC. Now, realize that M$ is the moron and Skype is the broken computer.