14 DAY TRIAL // The downtime of the famous VoIP software solution Skype is the main event that marked the week because the producers of the application sustained it was entirely caused by some Windows updates recently rolled out by Microsoft. If you didn't know, the program used by millions of customers from all over the world was unavailable for approximately 24 hours due to a sign-in error which was apparently caused by the recently released Microsoft Windows update. The Skype officials sustained on Monday that it all started when Microsoft updated a considerable number operating systems, a process which required the restart of the computers. According to the reports, the restart caused a sign-in flood when all the users tried to connect to the Skype servers using the VoIP clients.
"The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user's computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update. The abnormally 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," Villu Arak said. "Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring."
As usual, you can download the latest version of Skype, straight from Softpedia using this link.
Let me ask you a simple question. Which one do you think is more popular, Google or Yahoo? I'm sure your answer would be Google, but the folks from comScore, a market researcher which recently made a new study, said that Yahoo is the leader of the Top 50 Properties analysis. According to comScore, the Yahoo websites recorded no less than 133,428 unique visitors in July 2007 while Google, which was placed on the second position, had 123,892 unique visitors. The Redmond giant Microsoft won only the fourth position with a close number of visitors - 118,154.
"July saw the top nine properties remain unchanged from their June ranking, while Viacom Digital moved up two spots to number 10 attracting more than 43 million visitors. Glam Media jumped five positions to number 34, drawing nearly 21 million visitors in July, and Facebook.com grew 9 percent in unique visitors, moving up three spots to claim number 17 in the ranking," comScore wrote on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the Redmond-based software company decided to comment the recent Skype outage that was apparently caused by some Windows updates recently rolled out by Microsoft. Because the Skype representatives said that the improvements added to the operating systems flooded the servers and crashed them, the Microsoft officials went public and said that they have no fault for the Skype downtime. Moreover, they helped the folks working for the VoIP application to repair the bug faster.
"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," Christopher Budd, a Microsoft security expert, wrote. "Next, 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."
Following the recent moves made by Google in China, the Internet world is talking these days about a potential involvement of the Mountain View company in the social networks battle with famous rivals such as Facebook or MySpace. While Google's plans are only based on speculations, the Windows creator is making important steps into this market and signed a deal on Thursday with Bebo, another social networking website. Basically, the deal is meant to bring interoperability between Bebo and Windows Live Messenger, allowing the consumers of the two products to communicate with ease.
"We're excited to be working with Bebo to provide an innovative communication feature to one of the world's leading social networking services. Within the suite of Windows Live communications services "IM Me" allows individuals to richly communicate and keep in touch with the people who are important in their lives.. The global nature of both the Windows Live Messenger service and Bebo makes this relationship a perfect fit," Brian Hall, General Manager, Windows Live said.
If you want to download and install the latest version of Windows Live Messenger, you can take it from Softpedia.
On Friday, market researcher Hitwise, rolled out a new study that revealed a decrease in popularity for Microsoft's Live Search and, like we didn't know it, it underlined the supremacy of the Mountain View company Google. According to the report, Google is still the leader of the search engines with 64.35% of the total US searches in July 2007, 63.92% in June, increasing its numbers from a 60.23 percentage in the same period of the last year. Microsoft is only the third after the rival Yahoo, with 8.79% in July 2007, 9.85% in June 2007 and 11.77 points in the same period of the last year.
Microsoft's numbers "include executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search. Please note that the search volume share reported for www.live.com in the Search Engine Analysis Report for the four week rolling period starting the week ending June 9, 2007 includes searches automatically generated from a promotion on club.live.com. Search volume data from July 9, 2007 onwards does not include automatically generated searches from this promotion," Hitwise mentioned.
