I’ve been unable to use Skype for a couple of days. I assumed it was software or server related. Soon after Skype’s announcement that it was due to a Windows Update which apparently caused a lot of PC’s to reboot at the same time, the discussion started to escalate in the ‘”let’s blame Microsoft” direction. Not by Skype itself though, because as they clearly state in their blog release:

“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.”

According to a pretty large amount of people, Microsoft is to blame, however the update that was sent out did not differ that much from previous ones. As stated on the MSRC blog:

“…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.”

So despite the evil theories that go around, and in answer to the dozen phone calls I got from friends that asked me if it was on purpose to show the power of Microsoft: No. We don’t control the world, nor the universe. We didn’t crash Skype and what happened wasn’t our fault and it was not on purpose. It was just a get-together of inconvenient circomstances that lead to the discovery of a bug in the Skype software. There were no Russian hackers, and from the looks of our security response team, it’s highly unlikely that the Windows Update is to blame.

Update: [17.49] Check out Skype’s latest post on this issue for a very thorough explanation