VoIP provider Skype suffered a loss of service last week that lasted two days, leaving end users - including businesses - without VoIP services. Skype's come forward with a reason for the outage, making - in the eyes of this reporter - the situation even worse.
The Skwypeout occurred on Thursday and lasted for nearly two days, some getting back service before others as the firm got its systems back up and running.
During the height of the outage, there were claims by some that Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and hackers were the cause of the downtime.
However, Monday has seen Skype come forward with the reason behind outage. And it's not pretty:
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.
That's right, Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday" is to "blame" for the Skwypeout. A flood of concurrent logins occurred as lots of Skype users received MS's latest patches over Windows Update and were prompted to reboot, so the story goes.
The P2P based VoIP network couldn't handle it, crashing...
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.
Skype goes on to point out that very few comms networks guarantee to operate completely without disruption. Woah there!
BT, AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica etc must all be having a party as the bastion of IP-based telephony falters amidst a routine update rollout... that had nothing to do with Skype itself!
Skype has seriously damaged its reputation amongst its home and business users, but worse still, it's damaged the image of VoIP, heralded by many as a cheaper, more versatile replacement for the plain old telephone system.
Of course, Skype's VoIP protocol isn't SIP compliant, meaning it's not interoperable with standards that are generally associated with VoIP hardware.
Still, somehow the firm managed to fleece the world into adopting its proprietary VoIP software. But perhaps now that it's royally cocked up, people might think about turning to more standards-compliant solutions, for the sake of - oh, I dunno - failover capabilities?
