I Love That Windows Broke Skype
OK, so maybe Microsoft Windows didn’t really break Skype, but this is a great story. As most of you have probably already heard, Skype had a huge outage late last week, and the system was down for about thirty hours. Skype is a P2P network which means it uses resources from all over the world. It turns out that new patches were released through Windows Update last Tuesday that required a reboot to finish the installation. When all of these millions of computers rebooted at about the same time, and the users tried to log back in to Skype, the loss of P2P resources and the massive number of log ins overwhelmed the system. Skype claims to have fixed the bug so hopefully something like this will not happen again.
I still think Skype is an incredibly useful tool, and it provides a service that allows individuals and businesses to communicate around the world at a very reasonable price. I just couldn’t resist the fact the Microsoft’s Windows Update brought one of the Internet’s most widely used communications systems to its knees.
(via GigaOM)
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