Ever come to your Windows PC in the morning only to find something telling you that a critical Windows Update has occurred and your machine was rebooted. For a couple of years now, Microsoft has made available an automatic update process such that when they issue their update patches (usually the 2nd Tuesday of the month unless there is a very critical update required) millions of PC's need to be accessed and updated with no human intervention.

So Om asks why did the Skype outage only start Thursday morning when the Windows Update was released Tuesday. Here is my experience with the process:

1. Microsoft usually makes the patch available late in the day on Tuesday. And if you manually start a Windows Update you will get the patch.

2. However, Microsoft spreads out the automatic update process over a two to three day period, specifically due to the massive number of updates to be executed automatically and the consequent impact on both Microsoft's servers and their Internet traffic. In my own experience I will often find that one of my WinXP PC's has been updated by Wednesday morning while another (also WinXP) is updated Thursday morning. (And even my Win2000 PC automatically downloads the updates within two or three days of a release although I have to manually trigger the installation of the update.)

3. One can also expect that many PC users, having learned of an update Wednesday via the various media, probably also are triggering updates over the Wednesday/Thursday period.

Thus, it is quite reasonable to expect that the Windows Updates were occurring at a significant rate over Wednesday night/early Thursday when the Skype overload occurred. I first experienced the outage when I booted my PC at a country inn early Thursday morning (GMT-4).

Bottom line: That Perfect Storm can quite credibly be the combination of Windows Update reboots and the normal increase in Skype traffic usually seen between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. Eastern time when the Skype status bar online counter normally peaks.

As to Om's second question: "Will it happen again". Skype's answer (underlined in my previous post) is the next sentence after the one quoted by Om: "We’d like to reassure our users across the globe that we’ve done everything we need to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again." Rogers, after a 24 hour outage of their Canadian GSM wireless service in July, 2000, issued a similar statement; it has always been there for the seven years since. Looking at Skype's history of stability and the fact we had one outage in four years, I think we at some point have to have faith in the ability of the Skype team to resolve the problem. So just use it!

We all survived the Northeast power blackouts of November 1964 and August 2003. My Rogers Internet service, which used to go down at least once a week when I first got it in 1999, has been there for me steadily for the past two years (it helps that they completed the digital cable TV upgrade by then). Did I mention that this morning my email POP server was down for several hours and, when I went to my fitness club this morning, the power was out. Maybe this is National Outage Week.

Tags: Skype, Skype outage 2007, Windows Update