Microsoft's response to Skype's outage We've been getting questions from customers about a posting that Skype made today about a recent service outage they experienced on August 16, 2007.
Specifically, we have questions from customers looking for clarification about the role Windows Update and this month's release played in that situation, if any. Â In a nutshell, there was nothing different or unusual about this month's release. As Skype notes in its blog, 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.
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.
Fortunately, Skype has identified the cause. As Villu Arak notes, "a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm" was the cause, and they have corrected it.
As folks know, we monitor the situation closely after we release security updates. We are always watching for any issues that could have an impact on deploying the security updates, and overall, our ongoing monitoring of the last week's release shows that the deployment of updates is going smoothly. We encourage customers to continue testing and deploying the updates and to do like Skype did if they think they encounter an issue: contact our support teams right away.
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