Skype says Microsoft is to blame

Windows update synchronized reboot takes down VoIP network.

VoIP heavy hitters, Skype, an eBay company, has finished investigating what led to the network failure that left millions of skype users without service for almost 48 hours last week, and today issued a statement.

"On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. 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.

The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact."

Read the full statement on Skype's Blog

So in short, Skype is pointing fingers at August's Patch Tuesday for the outage. Patch Tuesday is the name Microsoft gives the second Tuesday of every month, which they typically use to push out patches via Windows Update. Most "Patch Tuesdays" contain significant code updates and often require a restart to take effect.

Skype goes on to say that with so many machines rebooting at the same time, the skype network was sunk into a vicous cycle of deprivation -- that rebooting machines were attempting to log into the Skype network, but the network was unable to keep up with the demand.

While I am not technally qualified to agree or rebute Skype's claims, It does seem rather suspicious that this had not happened on any of the other Patch Tuesdays since the inception of Skype back in August of 2003.

Now that Skype has had their say, Its going to be interesting to see what the Microsoft camp has to say ...