Skype was suffering from a brownout effect over the last few days. Users had trouble logging on. Now Skype said that Patch Tuesday was the cause. Or rather, the fact that millions of Windows users had their patches sent to them forcing them to reboot with in a short amount of time.
The blogosphere is ablaze with reports based on this statement, where Skype said that the peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption
“after massive numbers of its worldwide users restarted their machines at about the same time. The vast number of computers rebooting within a short time frame was due to a routine set of Windows Update patches, which require a restart once installed.”
The rebooting machines flooded Skype with log-in requests, which were unable to be filled because, well, so many of the machines on the P2P were offline and/or asking to log back in. The situation lasted about two days and Skype officials say that they are creating on workarounds for the next time that Microsoft releases an onslaught of critical patches for Windows.
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