Microsoft said there was nothing unusual about the Patch Tuesday update and that it did not affect an unusually high number of Microsoft users.
There is nothing unusual in this month’s release that could have contributed to this situation, said Microsoft security program manager Christopher Budd, on a Microsoft security blog yesterday. As Skype notes in its blog, the issue was a bug in the Skype software and not related to Tuesday’s updates.
Budd said Skype had contacted Microsoft to check whether there was anything out of the ordinary in the routine Patch Tuesday security updates, and that Microsoft can confirm there wasn’t.
Specifically, there were no issues introduced by the security updates that could have caused the situation, nor any issues introduced by the security updates themselves, Budd said. There also were no anomalies in this month’s Windows update in terms of reboots, size of the updates or speed of distributing the updates through Automatic Update, he said.
Skype last week blamed the outage on a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm that was the cause of the problems, and that it has been corrected.
Skype has made a number of improvements to its software to prevent the outage from happening again, said the company yesterday. But it declined to provide details. At this time, we are not able to share specifics about the software improvements Skype has introduced, said Jennifer Chu Caukin, director of corporate communications for Skype North America, in an email.
She said the software glitch resulted in a large majority of Skype users experiencing sign-in delays or no service at all. She declined to be specific.
The company said users’ machine restarts drained Skype’s peer-to-peer network resources, which caused an inundation of log-in requests.
Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an in-built 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, said the company, in a statement.
Skype reiterated the disruption was not the result of malicious activities. Our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk, said the company.
Our View
Microsoft has been releasing its monthly security updates, aka Patch Tuesday, for four years. Yet this is the first time it has had any significant effect on Skype, or any other real-time internet communications network.
Because Skype is declining to provide any technical information about the software glitch, beyond it being an algorithm bug, it is impossible to determine the precise problem and the likelihood of it happening again.
The somewhat mysterious explanation from Skype for the cause of the outage lends weight to speculation that the network may not have been developed with scale and resilience in mind. (See yesterday’s story Speculation Mounts as Skype Outage Persist.)
