Routine PC Patching By Redmond Blamed For Skype Outage

Posted by Paul Glazowski on August 20th, 2007

The Skype “outage” experienced late last week wouldn’t have been as newsworthy an item if it weren’t for the fact that millions use the service on a continual basis. (By the way, the servers are back up and running.)

In other words, Skype’s an essential component in the world of telephony, one that many, many, many people simple can’t do without. Yet they were forced to put their oh-so-cheap calls on hiatus for a day and a half. Why exactly? Well, in short, because of Microsoft.

Yep, Microsoft. While some might think this a low brow diversion by the guys at Skype to pin the blame on the Redmond-based tech giant – which has arguably spent roughly half its existence standing as a punching bag for all Valley-related problems and grievances – there’s actually something to this accusation, though in an indirect way. It turns out that just prior to being pushed offline for many an hour, Microsoft delivered a routine software update for what is now the fabled Patch Tuesday. Skype suspects that the outage was indeed caused by one too many users rebooting and restarting their systems, which thus allegedly wreaked havoc on the company’s own servers. In a statement, the company claimed that the occurrence “revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.”

Alright, so folks at Skype are saying the problem has to do with a problem on its end, but because a massive Microsoft-led restart was what led to the bug’s detection, Redmond is thus to blame?

Actually, no. This is in fact an instance of spin, in which a big problem involving a big company (Skype) and a much, much bigger company (Microsoft) has lots of folks naturally setting their spiteful gazes at the larger target.

In all, this looks like a simple (but no doubt massive) coincidence, and one that Skype will keep in mind not to replicate in the future. Strange how it’s never happened before, though, eh? One would expect that such an event would’ve occurred in months past. This just goes to show that you really can’t ever debug enough.

On the upside, consider how nice the 36-hour-plus stretch of peace and quiet was for some people. Surely some wish that Skype would encounter similar problems on a regular basis. Unfortunately, that probably won’t be the case come future Patch Tuesdays, so to those who took the downtime in stride, we hope you took advantage of every minute of respite given. Chances are it won’t happen again.

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