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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.
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.
That's what Skype says. Doesn't sound like they're blaming anyone but themselves.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Skype blames global warming on Colonel Mustard. In the conservatory (greenhouse). With the pipe. Since Colonel Mustard callously smashed all the windows in the greenhouse, it released all sorts of greenhouse gases into the environment thus dooming all the gay, baby polar bears unless the polar bears cooled themselves off by running the AC units of their Hummers at full blast. Why does Colonel Mustard hate the environment?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Something was different last week wrt Microsoft. I had six servers reboot that had autoupdates turned off. My desktop system running 2003R2 and my laptop running XP also rebooted w/o my permission. We have quite a few pissed-off customers because of the updates. It was an unusual situation.
Given that this baby was steamrolled through the Congress two weeks ago, the outage seems coincidental.
Consider that Skype could not tell the users of the real reason even if they wanted to: the law mandates that the forced cooperation be kept in secret.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I think this demonstrates the goofiness of a p2p telephone system. If I use Skype, I depend upon my data flowing through other users' computers because I am too dumb to allow incoming VOIP connections to my computer.
VOIP connections should be direct encrypted connections from my computer to the computer of the person whom I wish to contact. Period.
Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage
For the love of God editors, I understand that it is fine to write a sensationalist title on some articles but that is blatant FALSE. It is a complete LIE. People at Skype specifically stated that the fault was in *their* log-in mechanisms.
Really this kind of journalism is disgusting... I am tagging this story as LIE which I hope other people do as well, unless editors change the title.
I find hard to believe Slashdot has got so low... this and the speculative digg-like "articles" ending with a question mark "?", What the fuck.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I don't remember where/when this happened, so it might be an urban legend. But the story is that many years ago an earthquake rattled a California town. No major damage was done, but it killed all the phones in the town for several days.
:)
The earthquake had jostled thousands of telephones off hook. The central office switches survived the quake just fine, but crashed due to a bug that seems eerily like the one Skype just described. Basically the switch kept a list of phones that were off hook. The switch is responsible for playing "dial tone" to those phones, but the central office only had a certain number of units that could play dial tone and listen for dialing. So the first "n" phones off hook got dial tone; the rest were put into a FIFO list of phones waiting for dial-tone equipment.
There were so many phones off hook due to the earthquake that the FIFO list overflowed, crashing the switch.
When the switch rebooted, it had to figure out which phones needed dial-tone. So it had to examine each phone line in turn, putting the ones that were off hook into the queue for a dial tone...thus overflowing the list and crashing the switch again. And again. And again.
After a while the telco folks figured out what was wrong, but then couldn't tell anyone about it...since the phones were down. They eventually had police and fire trucks driving all over town, stopping to hang up all the pay phones that were jostled off hook, and blaring over megaphones for people to hang up their phones.
Eventually enough phones were hung up so the switch could reboot without crashing - end of crisis.
Good times.