Tuesday October 23, 2007 Skype's Major Outage Blamed on Microsoft
Skype's service outage should serve as a warning to any company offering services to its customers. The message is clear.. Microsoft Windows Vista isn't ready for 7x24.
The massive outage on August 16 and August 18 caused denied Skype's subscribers access to their accounts and ability to make phone calls. The company is reporting that the cause was due to the standard monthly Windows updates causing Skype's production PCs to reboot unexpectedly.
A report by Ferris Free News Service believes that this outage was due to the standard monthly Windows updates causing PCs running Skype to reboot. These updates were unique because "they FORCED a reboot of unattended PCs" without notice to administrators. All this happened within normal working hours when usage of the popular Skype service was at its peak.
This reboot eventually caused a spiraling failure when after the reboots. The reconnects after the reboots forced failures of their authentication servers that and problems with their network routing algorithms created the "perfect storm."
Further Readings
ComputerWorld's Richi Jennings on the Outage
Technorati Tags: Internet, VOIP, Solaris, sys admin, Windows
( Oct 23 2007, 03:36:13 PM PDT ) Permalink
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