14 DAY TRIAL // Following its extensive outage began on August 16, Skype pointed to Microsoft as the source of the disruption, holding the Redmond company indirectly responsible for throwing the Voice over Internet Protocol service into approximately two days of downtime. Initially, Skype's Villu Arak failed to reference Microsoft's monthly patch cycle in relation to the instability and critical system failure of the peer-to-peer network, but then revealed that the "routine set of patches through Windows Update" was at fault, following the release on August 14 from the Redmond company.
"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", Arak added stating that "the massive restart of our users' computers across the globe" triggered the disruption, and unveiled a bug that prevented the network's inbuilt self-healing capabilities from functioning. "The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype", Arak concluded.
Microsoft adopted a defensive position in relation to the August 2007 Security Bulletins, and adjacent updates. "There was nothing different or unusual about this month's release," explained Christopher Budd, a security program manager in the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). "As Skype notes, the issue was a bug in the Skype software and not related to Tuesday's updates. To give some more detail, we were contacted by Skype about this last week and have worked to help them. First, we checked to see if there were any issues introduced by the security updates that could have caused the situation, and we found that there were no issues introduced by the security updates themselves."
At this point in time, Skype had yet to identify the actual source of the outage. However, even though a bug in Skype's own VoIP infrastructure prevented the P2P network from repairing itself, the disruption was indeed caused by Windows Update, although Microsoft stated that there is nothing different between the August release and the updates made available in previous months.
"We checked with our Microsoft/Windows Update teams to see if there was anything unusual in this month's update in terms of reboots, size of the updates or speed of distributing the updates through Automatic Update. We confirmed that there is nothing unusual in this month's release that could have contributed to this situation. From a release point of view, this month's release followed our usual format and processes," Budd added.