The Hindu : Front Page : Behind the Skype outage

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 22, 2007
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Behind the Skype outage

Disruption caused by massive restart

FRANKFURT: A two-day outage that left millions of avid Skype users unable to use the popular Internet phone call program was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update through Microsoft’s automatic updates, the company said.

The worldwide outage, which ran Thursday throughSaturday, left millions of users unable to log on to make phone calls or send messages.

Luxembourg-based Skype, part of online auction giant eBay, has more than 220 million users in total but typically has five million to six million users online at any given time. In January, Skype reported that it had counted nine million users online at one time.

In an update provided on Skype’s Heartbeat blog, employee Villu Arak said the disruption was not because of hackers or any other malicious activity.

Instead, he said that 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,” he wrote.

“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.”

Mr. Arak did not blame Microsoft for the troubles and said the outage ultimately rested with Skype. Arak said Skype’s network normally has an ability to heal itself in such cases, but a previously unknown glitch in Skype’s software prevented that from occurring quickly enough.

On the Net, Skype messaging is at http://heartbeat.skype.com — AP

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