Skype's Explanation For Downtime Not Ringing True
from the something's-missing-here dept
It took quite a while, but Skype was finally able to get its service back up and running after extended downtime last week. Monday morning, Skype posted an explanation of what happened, but it has many of us scratching our heads -- and many professionals questioning Skype and trying to match up the official explanation to reality. Skype officially blamed all the rebooting Windows computers due to Windows latest security patch. It must be nice to blame Microsoft, but it's hard to understand why that should be the problem. First of all, Microsoft security patch updates happen pretty regularly (normally once a month), often requiring the same reboot process. Why would this time suddenly be different than every time in the past? Skype doesn't explain that. Second, and much more importantly, the service crashed at 3am PT on Thursday morning. That's about 24 hours after most computers would be rebooting. Microsoft comes out with its patches on Tuesday, and most computers then do the reboot in the early hours of Wednesday morning, not Thursday morning.
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Microsoft Not to Blame
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Re: Microsoft Not to Blame
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Skype doesn't blame Microsoft
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Re: Skype doesn't blame Microsoft
Er... while it's true that they officially take full responsibility, they do basically say that it was the MS patch that kicked off the problem (and nearly all of the press reports are focusing on this). That's convenient for Skype, because they knew the press would focus in on that, no matter what they said about their own algorithm.
The point, however, is not who is to blame, but that this explanation doesn't seem to make much sense.
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1+1=5
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Re: Auto Reboot
They didn't blame this in any way on Microsoft either. They clearly state that the problem was theirs and that the Microsoft patch was perfectly routine.
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So Bobby can't talk Suzy out of her panties for a little while. Life will go on.
Bobby will find pr0n. Suzy will get slammed by the jock / emo kid / wigger / fillInTheBlank down the block.
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Re: Porn and looosers?
I don't know where your head is at, but from your post I get the impression that you may think the internet is all about getting 'Suzy' out of her panties for you (dream on) and porn. Then again, that may be all you've seen of it. I can't say.
The userbase has definitely changed since you looked into it. My impression is that if you were to contact me on my Skype, I would be forced to block you. For that, I apologize in advance.
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Re: Re: Porn and looosers?
It's matured. Good to know.
>You may have looked into the program a looong time ago
Yeah, like I said. =) It was a long time ago.
>(What's with the 'o's, anyway?)
Emphasis, baby! =D
>It has totally replaced my home phone service, and I have found it to be completely reliable. Well, outside of a very few instances.
Oh, like the major f'in crash? lol.
>I don't know where your head is at,
Dude. Come on. LOL.
>but from your post I get the impression that you may think the internet is all about getting 'Suzy' out of her panties for you (dream on) and porn.
That's what 99% of life is about.
>The userbase has definitely changed since you looked into it.
Good to know.
>My impression is that if you were to contact me on my Skype, I would be forced to block you. For that, I apologize in advance.
Don't feel too bad. I'm used to it. =D
*mumbles something about restraining orders*
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Re:
If you're using Skype to look for new 'friends' probably then the teen losers is all you'll get and you deserve it - it's not really a social networking service for finding new friends, it's a communication medium.
I moved to Spain a couple of years ago and I use Skype to keep in touch with my family and friends back in the UK. I do this because it's over 20 times cheaper to do so if I'm calling a landline, and free if I'm calling a friend on Skype.
The last company I worked for here also used Skype for people in 3 different offices to easily talk and/or message each other.
And so on...
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Re: Re:
Not trollbait. Just an asshole that didn't understand what the bfd about Skype having a hiccup was about. Big difference. =D
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Re:
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Well...
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Not quite right
John, you should read a bit more carefully. The reboot that they mention is not the reboot of their servers but the reboot of PCs around the world with Skype set to startup with Windows. I'm certain they would not let their production servers reboot without a failover in place.
In the Skype architecture, each user's computer attempts to act as a node in the Skype network which assists in scalability and apparently fault tolerance to some extent.
The less nodes, the more work their root servers must perform. In this case since so many nodes were offline and came online at once (due to the MS update) a flood of login attempts hit their servers. They basically DoS attacked themselves.
Still a poor excuse though. As many have pointed out, why hasn't this happened before when MS released updates which require a reboot?
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Re: Not quite right
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Man... I like Suzie..
I REALLY like Suzy....
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A Few Missing Variables...
Also, to answer why this happened at a time other than the schedueled update time, I can think of two explanations. First, it is possible that the problem in question did not cause errors until after the initial flood of login requests. Anyone who has used a computer long enough knows that a corrupted disk sector or bad bit of RAM can go unnoticed for days, because only when the system tries to access the bad secor will a problem arise. Another, less likely scenario is while a problem occured, it didn't cause the server to crash, but administrators dicided to take them offline preemtively so as to prevent a more serious error from occuring.
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Re: A Few Missing Variables...
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With that, I don't think all those machines re-starting and reconnecting at once would do it alone. But the whole point of Windows Updates is to fix things, and that means changing something. They could have fixed a flaw somewhere in the network code that results in Skype's authentication system having to work harder or simply not handling requests correctly.
However, even if this is the case the blame still rests squarely with Skype. It was their bad code all along that actually caused the outage. The Windows Update only triggered it.
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