Wednesday, 22 August 2007

Microsoft Patch Tuesday Responsible For Skype Breakdown

Voice over IP provider Skype has blamed Microsoft for the service outage last week. It claimed that its services were down due to a surge of users logging on after installing Microsoft's latest security update.

The crash caused a two-day outage of the service and prompted speculation that the VoIP provider had fallen victim to a denial-of-service attack.

Skype explained that the outage arose when a large number of users installed Microsoft's August security update.

After restarting their most users attempted to log in to the Skype service, causing an overload on the components of the service that handle peer-to-peer connections.

A "self-healing" feature would normally intervene and allow the system to correct or compensate for the increased load. But the feature failed to activate and the result was a chain reaction that took down the entire service.