Skype: "It's Microsoft and Your Fault"

Update 14:00 Monday: Here are some good reads regarding how Skype handled the outage:

  • Andy Beal thinks they dropped the ball with crisis communications
  • Om Malik wonders why he didn't receive one email with an update - great point Om!
  • Peter Ha agrees with me - it's your fault!
  • Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft seems to say "what else aren't they telling us, it can't be Microsoft's fault"

SkypeSkype has provided the full explanation as to what happened last week when the service experienced an outage lasting over 36 hours. They open the explanation with:

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.

So if I read correctly, it was our fault for updating Windows. Blah. What would have been great is to start with, "We are sorry, we screwed up." Instead, they push the blame around. Double blah.

They continue with:

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.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt 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. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

So there was also an issue with Skype's software but this wouldn't have happened if MS provided bug-free software. I love Skype but am disappointed with this final update message.

AddThis
Forward
RSS Feed
COMMENTS - Add New Comment
Submitted by ktoh on August 20, 2007 - 11:00am.

Allen:
So CN got a new look? How can there be no official post about this?

:P .. Looks awesome to me.

Submitted by centernetworks on August 20, 2007 - 11:42am.

Yep new look -- more to come once the transition is complete (either tonight or tomorrow).

:)

Submitted by Anonymous on August 21, 2007 - 5:27am.

so does it mean to say that Skype can handle lots of people chatting at the same time but not the same number of people logging in at the same time??

Become a sponsor

SPONSORS

Maxtango
CloudContacts
Clicky Web Analytics
Advertise here

PARTNERS

read centernetworks anywhere!

OTHER STUFF