Skype apologises to Microsoft

Internet telephony player Skype has issued something of an apology, after seemingly blaming Microsoft for the massive outage, which made its network unavailable for nearly 48 hours last week.

Skype said the disruption was triggered by a restart of massive numbers of Skype users’ computers within a very short timeframe after they all received a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The statement appeared to implicate Microsoft in the problem. But on Tuesday, the VoIP provider made a clarifying statement: “We don’t blame anyone but ourselves. The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst – 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.”

Skype said the high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources, causing a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction.

But the company admitted, “there was nothing different about this set of Microsoft patches.

“After going through the potential causes, it appeared clearer than ever to us that our software’s P2P network management algorithm was not tuned to take into account a combination of high load and supernode rebooting.”

Skype has assured its users it has now fixed the problem.