During the heart of the holiday season, when traffic was at its peak, Skype suffered a crippling outage that lasted for an entire day.  So what was the root cause of Skype’s network connection problems?  Why, Windows, of course.  Specifically, a bug in a particular version of Skype’s windows client crashed the entire network.  Older versions and the newest version of Skype were unaffected, but the feedback loop was bad enough to knock vast portions of Skype’s supernode system offline, thus crippling global communication.

“We believe these measures will reduce the possibility of this type of failure occurring again,” wrote Skype’s Lars Rabbe in a blog post.  “We are truly grateful to all of our users and humbled by your continued support.  We know how much you rely on Skype, and we know that we fell short in both fulfilling your expectations and communicating with you during this incident.  Lessons will be learned and we will use this as an opportunity to identify and introduce areas of improvement to our software.”

The problem is that people don’t upgrade their Skype clients on a regular basis.  Nobody updates as often as they should, myself included.  Skype is planning on an improved automated update system to prevent this kind of catastrophe in the future.

Tags: Skype, Windows, Skype outage, Skype outage blamed on bug in Windows client, Windows Skype client, Windows Skype client bug blamed for Skype connection issues, Skype connection outage blamed on Windows, Lars Rabbe, Skype knocked offline by bug in Windows client

I’ve never had a problem eating food from a gas station.  Just two weeks ago, I ate a couple of hot dogs purchased from a gas station.  They were delicious.  That’s not the first time I’ve eaten gas station food, and I doubt it will be the last.  There’s nothing like a fun food novelty. […]

Commissioner Roger Goodell gathered 32 NFL owners for one big question.  One of the league’s most wanderlust-stricken franchises is looking to move again.  The Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland Raiders, tired of gutting it out in a run-down stadium, were once again looking for greener pastures.  Only the Miami Dolphins refused to cooperate.  With a vote of 31-1, […]

In 2006, an injury to Dallas Cowboys starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe opened the door for an undrafted free agent by the name of Tony Romo to take the helm of America’s Team and lead the Dallas Cowboys to an early playoff exit.  Bledsoe went from starter to afterthought in a season.  Now, the circle continues […]

For 89 years, Oscars has never had a major mistake.  The last few Oscars might have had a few flubs, but at least they never got the most important category of the night wrong.  Well, that’s now changed, all thanks to OG Bonnie and Clyde legends Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.  When Faye Dunaway called […]

Tom Brady has been wildly successful, if controversial.  He’s the first quarterback ever to win five Super Bowls and only the second player to do so after Charles Haley.  Unlike Haley, Brady won all his Super Bowls with the same team, the New England Patriots.  The only thing that seems to be able to stop […]

Ben Affleck, no matter what you might think of him, is a talented actor and director.  He’s got the goods, but he’s smart enough to know when he’s in over his head.  All along, since he took on the mantle of Batman, he’s had his eyes on writing, directing, and starring as the Caped Crusader. […]

In May, students for the for-profit American College of Education were running into some problems.  Their access to email accounts and course information was locked down by Google, who had disabled their accounts.  The reason why?  A fired IT worker for the American College of Education locked the school out of their Google cloud account. […]