The situation that forbid jillion of the great unwashed from get at Skype ’s Internet telephone service late last week was a “ stark storm ” and should not reoccur , the society said Tuesday .
The company ab initio attribute the job , which began on Aug. 16 , to the near - coincident rebooting of zillion of computers , as Skype substance abuser start the Windows operating system attempted to reconnect to the service after downloading a serial publication of everyday software program patches from Microsoft ’s Windows Update service .
Skype ’s service trust on some of its user ’ computers to act as “ supernodes , ” route traffic for other , less well - connect , users . But as Skype customers tried to reconnect , many of those supernodes were themselves in the process of rebooting . The remaining supernodes were before long overwhelmed because a bug in the company ’s package did not efficiently apportion the internet resources uncommitted .
Users were disbelieving of this explanation , because Microsoft regularly make out patches that may cause Windows computers to reboot , and this has not caused problems for Skype before . Microsoft releases computer software updates on the 2d Tuesday of each month , a twenty-four hour period known to systems administrator as “ patch Tuesday . ”
Skype spokesman Villu Arak offered amore detailed explanationof Skype ’s outage on Tuesday : Last week ’s job were the result of a “ ” arrant storm ” of exceptionally in high spirits traffic through the servicing at the same clock time as the Windows Update unconscious process led to a shortage of supernodes in the armed service ’s peer - to - peer net .
The party did not declare oneself an explanation for the high dealings , but accepted full responsibility for the software trouble .
“ Skype and Microsoft engineers go through the list of patches that had been advertize out , ” Arak wrote . “ We ruled each one out as a potential causal agent for Skype ’s problem . We also walk through the stock Windows Update process to read it good and to ensure that nothing in the physical process had changed from the past ( and nothing had ) . ”
The ruinous effect on Skype ’s service was entirely Skype ’s mistake , a upshot of its software being unable to deal with simultaneous high load and supernode rebooting , according to Arak .
On Aug. 17 , the day after the problems began , Skype released a new variation of its software guest for Windows to correct the problem . That update should behave well the next sentence high dealings co-occur with a scarcity of supernodes , he enunciate .
Skype had update versions of its software client for Windows , Mac and Linux since July ’s plot of ground Tuesday and before last week ’s outage , but the changes made in those update were not responsible for for the trouble , fit in to company spokeswoman Imogen Bailey .
