Skype outage caused by Patch Tuesday?

Now that the Skype outage is finally behind us, we can all take a deep breath, relax and make some VoIP calls to people who we would normally never call on the telephone. After days of downtime, however, you can't help but wonder what caused the massive outage that left Skype users VoIP-less for a solid two days. The culprit, according to the folks at Skype, was none other than Windows Update. That's right, according to Skype, "The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update...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." So, August's Patch Tuesday is to blame, eh? Well, not exactly. As Ars Technica duly noted, the massive Windows Update-induced reboot only served to illuminate a previously unknown flaw in Skype's code. "Normally Skype's peer-to-peer network has an in-built ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly," the company said.

For more on the causes of the Skype outage:
- see this Ars Technica article