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Skype Blames Massive Reboot For Failure |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
As promised Skype has posted a more detailed explanation of the cause behind the massive shutout users experienced late last week. Details of the fault that caused the peer-to-peer network to falter are still a little sketchy, but it seems a massive reboot of users PCs after Microsoft's Monthly Patch update caused a DoS style flood of log-in requests, claims Skype.
The company continues to deny there was any form of attack as some sources have suggested. The blog post outlining the problem says in part: "The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can
confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or
that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk."
Rather, the problem which caused two days of outages for the service's millions of users was the result of a massive global reboot, says the blog post.
"On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer
network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The
disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user's computers
across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after
receiving a routine software update," says the statement.
"The abnormally 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 Skype's peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to
self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software
bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented
the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a
result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its
users for approximately two days," claims the company, before going on to say that it really has a pretty good track record for reliable service.
The company also tried to reassure users that this is was a one off saying: "Skype has now identified and already introduced a
number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will
not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this
combination of events recurring."
Something tells me we haven't heard the last of this. Many questions are already being raised about the company's handling of the failure and no doubt these will continue - starting with why it took two days for the system to recover and why it took Skype nearly 48 hours after announcing the crisis was over to post a 283 word explanation.
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