Skype has
clarified an
earlier
statement which appeared to blame
Microsoft's
monthly
patch for last week's
outage of the VoIP service.
Skype had attributed the two-day crash of its service to a large number of
Windows users logging on after rebooting their systems to install Microsoft's
monthly updates.
The flood of log-on requests effectively launched a denial-of-service attack
against Skype's log-on service.
Owing to a lack of additional information, the justification seemed to blame
Microsoft. On Tuesday, however, Skype posted a full admission that sought to
clear the software giant.
"We do not blame anyone but ourselves," wrote Skype spokesman Villu Arak in a
blog
posting.
"The Microsoft Update patches were merely 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."
Microsoft responded to repeated inquiries on Monday into its role in the
outage, stressing that it had nothing to do with it.
"In a nutshell, there was nothing different or unusual about this month's
patch release," said Christopher Budd, a security programme manager at
Microsoft.
"The issue was a bug in the Skype software and not related to Tuesday's
[Microsoft] updates."
Skype uses a peer-to-peer infrastructure that connects users without the
interference of a central server, meaning that some users are attributed the
role of a 'supernode' that allows the network to function.
Although Skype suffers from a high volume of sign-ons every month, August was
struck by what Arak said was a "perfect storm".
"Our software's peer-to-peer network management algorithm was not tuned to
take into account a combination of high load and supernode rebooting," he
explained.
After fixing the way that Skype deals with a large number of system reboots,
the company retuned its peer-to-peer structure.
Users have fumed at last week's collapse, while
competitors
rejoiced as Skype demonstrated that its service are unreliable. In an
attempt to dispel these perceptions, Arak assured users that last week was an
isolated incident.
"We would like to reassure our users across the globe that we have done
everything we need to do to make sure this does not happen again," he wrote.
"We have already introduced a number of improvements to our software to
ensure our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of
this combination of events recurring."
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