After a massive disruption in service and a belated explanation of what went down, Skype ended up facing more backlash than it every asked for. So today, Skype has added even more updates regarding the reboot nightmare that took over Skype last week. For clarification purposes, Skype has issued the following:
"Are we blaming Microsoft for what happened?"
We don’t blame anyone but ourselves. The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst — a trigger — for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it. And Microsoft has been very helpful and supportive throughout.
The high number of post-update reboots affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources at the time, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact. The self-healing mechanisms of the P2P network upon which Skype’s software runs have worked well in the past. Simply put, every single time Skype has needed to recover from reboots that naturally accompany a routine Windows Update, there hasn’t been a problem.
Unfortunately, this time, for the first time, Skype was unable to rise to the challenge and the reasons for this were exceptional...
While some accepted the initial explanation offered by Skype, others are wondering why this particular Windows update wreaked such havoc on the system. In response, Skype says:
"What was different about this set of Microsoft update patches?"
In short – there was nothing different about this set of Microsoft patches. During a joint call soon after problems were detected, Skype and Microsoft engineers went through the list of patches that had been pushed out. We ruled each one out as a possible cause for Skype’s problems. We also walked through the standard Windows Update process to understand it better and to ensure that nothing in the process had changed from the past (and nothing had). The Microsoft team was fantastic to work with, and after going through the potential causes, it appeared clearer than ever to us that our software’s P2P network management algorithm was not tuned to take into account a combination of high load and supernode rebooting.
So what now? Can we all trust Skype again?