A lot of people were unable to use Skype for two days. They claim it’s due to a Windows Update, which was caused by everyone’s computer restarting and logging into Skype all at once. That’s a good reason, but shouldn’t Skype already be prepared for a lot of people signing in at once? I guess that wasn’t entirely the only reason behind it being down.

The disruption was initiated by a massive restart of our user’s computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update.

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.