The mysterious Skype outage
It's fairly well-known now that Skype had been out of action for the best part of a week, and according to their analysis this was due to "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".OK. That's possible. Poor systems design on their part, but still plausible.
But wait a minute. Microsoft release OS patches on the second Tuesday of every month, the so-called "Patch Tuesday". They've been doing this for a few years now, and almost every set of patches that are released require a reboot of the relevant computers.
So why was this mass co-ordinated reboot of Windows machines different to all the previous mass co-ordinated reboots? Perhaps the number of Skype users had passed some critical level which meant their systems were no longer able to cope. Or perhaps "Patch Tuesday" was just a part of the problem and a convenient scapegoat for something a bit more complex ... or sinister.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines!
posted by Iain @ 07:05
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