Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage 286
brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.
Is it just me (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yeah........ (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming this is true... (Score:1, Insightful)
Methinks Skype has other issues that they don't want to admit to, so it's easier to sort of blame M$.
Grow up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah........ (Score:4, Insightful)
Skype network was overloaded by the zillions of Windows PCs rebooting after the patch installations.
Note absence of word "Microsoft" (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that nowhere in Skype's announcement does the word "Microsoft" appear.
It's very striking how, when some major vulnerability appears, Microsoft's name doesn't appear prominently in news releases.
It also reminds you that Redmond has the power to reboot most of the computers in the world remotely. What if, one day, they didn't come back up?
Re:Yeah........ (Score:2, Insightful)
You still typically need to reboot when done. In this case, I don't think the load should have been a big issue - other than what was mentioned by another reply, namely that it would increase the variance of time for when the reboots occured (differing connection speeds). This would actually be to the advantage of Skype I'd think.
Re:Monoculture and software failures (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really why do you think that any exploit for Windows is so dangerous? Even then if you think about it the idea that EVERY windows system is going to have to reboot on a certian day is just laughable.
Re:Oh please! (Score:5, Insightful)
For the love of God editors, I understand that it is fine to write a sensationalist title on some articles but that is blatant FALSE. It is a complete LIE. People at Skype specifically stated that the fault was in *their* log-in mechanisms.
Really this kind of journalism is disgusting... I am tagging this story as LIE which I hope other people do as well, unless editors change the title.
I find hard to believe Slashdot has got so low... this and the speculative digg-like "articles" ending with a question mark "?", What the fuck.
Re:Assuming this is true... (Score:4, Insightful)
Load testing is hard. I know. I used to do it. It is hard to anticipate what your peak load might be. It can also be hard to generate the right kinds and volumes of loads that your service might experience. Proper load testing requires a realistic test bed with enough machines running client simulation scripts to sufficiently load the machine. This requires a deep understanding from management that spending large amounts of money on non-production systems is essential. Your setup might deal with some kinds of load well and fail on others. Perhaps Skype had considered what might happen during a natural disaster with a large number of calls originating at the same time, but neglected to see login as a significant risk, especially if they had weathered that storm before.
My least proud moment in quality assurance was seeing my company's service go down for a weekend due to excessive database load. We had a new version of our web service software that required significant database changes to each user account (including database structure redesign...go ahead and wade through that hard book on database principles before you start coding my friends...funny its what I'm doing right now as I go from QA dude to programmer). We made an upgrade script that ran when each user logged in, which brought the user's data up to date with the current version of our software. The thing is I knew about the risk, measured a high load at user login, notified engineering about the potential problem, but didn't demand that the upgrade be placed on hold until the issue could be better quantified. Ah, live and learn.
-Jon
Cry much, noobs? (Score:1, Insightful)
Typical FOSSies must work for Skype: always blaming their lack of coding skill on Microsoft.
hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:P2P dumbness (Score:3, Insightful)
Hello, it's the freaking internet, you're call is going to get routed to hell and back. Encrypted or not, you're going to be bouncing from routers to ISPs, to backbones, and back down the other side, and depending on your flavor you may even have a 3rd party provider to talk to in the loop.
-Rick
Re:Yeah........ (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you monitor your dial tone with nagios? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you've never been affected by an outage of your phone service, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been out of service ever.
Plus, you pay for it too. At $30-40/month per line, you expect minimal outages. When you are paying $30/year or even nothing, a two day outage, while annoying, isn't surprising, especially when operated on a public network. Your phone line is on a private, dedicated network. You simply can't compare the two when it comes to uptime.
If all of Skype's customers paid $30-40/month, I'm much more confident that they wouldn't have had this outage.
Re:Wiretap law? (Score:1, Insightful)
Otherwise the law has no point really, especially for internet companies, since it's easy enough to set up an overseas shell company.
Re:Like I needed another reason not to use VoIP (Score:1, Insightful)
This is why I won't even consider VoIP. Why in the world would I want to take risks like this?
I hear you, buddy. Maybe someday, someone somewhere will figure out a way to do VoIP without it being utterly dependent on Skype's login service. Until Skype is reliable, there is no point to subscribing to Vonage, Comcast, Verizon or AT&T's VoIP offerings.
And don't get me started on Asterisk, Cisco, Avaya and 3Com! How many businesses came in Thursday morning to find that their PBXes were down due to Skype making VoIP so risky. Bet they were pissed.
Re:Skype did not blame Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this how it's supposed to work?
Re:Skype said it's the reboots that matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh please! (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? So when they said [skype.com], "[t]he disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update", they didn't really mean it?
Come on, just admit that you're wrong. It was a fault with their auth service in the sense that it wasn't able to cope with a Patch Tuesday-induced slashdotting that it wasn't designed for.
The same way Australians can live in Australia, even though I've seen "The Road Warrior" and personally would not wish to.
Re:That's the reason the use MS (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to Slashdot.
They rightly blamed M$. (Score:3, Insightful)
SKYPE is blaming Skype for the outage quite contrary to the completely misleading headline on this article.
No, I don't know better [slashdot.org]. They have takes some part of the blame but a M$ anomaly was the initiating cause. To be fair to Skype you have to admit that 85% of the world's computers turning off at the same time is not an event a normal person would predict nor could such an event be tested in advance. M$'s synchronized forced updates are a menace.
Re:What part of Skype's Blog Did You Not Understan (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, there was a problem with Skype's code and Skype admitted to it, but the initiating factor is all Twitter. That's blame casting and Twitter deserves it. The summary mentions the code flaw, so I don't see what your problem besides an outsided [fuck! Even Firefox has no idea what that word means!] love for an incompetent software maker. For anyone to report things differently is to misconstrue things [notice I altered this sentence slightly. Also note that it's no more bullshit than your sentence].
Re:If this is true... (Score:3, Insightful)
Serves Skype right (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry. I have a rabid hatred of TSRs. Particularly those that don't show up in the Startup folder.