Skype points finger over outage

Internet telephony provider Skype is back on its feet after a major outage last week and the company is laying the blame on Microsoft.

Apparently, 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.

Skype said 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.”

Normally the VoIP provider’s peer to peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, but the company said that this most recent event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.

As a result, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.