Skype lets Microsoft off
p2pnet news | security:- Ahhhh. So it wasn’t eBay’s Skype. It was Microsoft’s regular try-to-fix-it Tuesday.
Or was it?
“Following a two-day global outage, Skype’s internet phone service is back to normal,” says the CBC, among others. “Skype says the outage was triggered by millions of its users rebooting their computers following a routine download of a Windows update.”
But on its Heartbeat blog, Skype says:
“Yesterday, we posted an explanation of what happened to Skype on August 16. Some reactions to the explanation, however, have reminded us of one of the basic tenets of communication: It’s not what you say. It’s what they hear.
“We’d therefore like to clear a few misunderstandings that emerged in yesterday’s reactions to our explanation of what transpired last week.”
So, “We don’t blame anyone but ourselves,” says the blog. “The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst – a trigger – for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it.”
Not only but also, “Microsoft has been very helpful and supportive throughout.”
And it adds, “In short – there was nothing different about this set of Microsoft patches.”
Now you know.
Also See:
CBC – Skype blames service disruption on routine Windows update, August 21, 2007
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August 22nd, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Really?
Well I am sure that I am not the only one who has gone to to computer in the morning, ready to copy the transcoded versions of a two hour movie to his iPod, so that he can watch it in the train,
on the way to work- only to find that his PC has been rebooted by Microsoft, because of the patches.
Nor am I the only one who has left work in progress on the PC, so that I could take a shower, get a bite to eat, etc…, and have come back with their PC rebooted, again my MS.
All of this as a result of MS “knowing what’s best for you” and rebooting your PC without your consent. Oh sure, if you are at your PC all of the time, you get a nice message telling you that you should reboot, and if you choose to ignore it, you get the nag-message a few mins. later.
I have worked with people who do VFX rendering, and loath MS’s monthly update features, because they risk loosing a whole night’s work of rendering, when their PC is rebooted during a rendering.
Sure, you can turn off the “automatic updates”feature, impractical but possible, and better yet use the “manual updates”, but unless you turn off the update features completely, some “critical” updates can still reboot your PC for you.
And to top that off, even if you do turn off all updating features, and only use the web to update your PC, then you are still faces with the nagging “please reboot your system” message, that will not go away.
So, while this update may not have directly been the cause of Skype’s systems to go offline, and can’t seriously help but wonder if it didn’t have a part in it.
just my two cents