Skype says reboots downed network

Millions of simultaneous reboots took out the Skype network, the Luxembourg VoIP provider said today.

"The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," said Skype spokesman Villu Arak on the company's Heartbeat blog. The group reboot revealed an "unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly."

Skype told users Saturday to take a deep breath. After a 48-hour outage, the service was said to be  "back to normal." Skypers started reporting sign-on problems last Wednesday, soon after planned maintenance was carried out. Speculation soon circulated that Russian hackers knocked out the network, but Ark said that wasn't the case.

"We'd like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing," Arak blogged Friday. "Neither Wednesday's planned maintenance of our Web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way."

Arak reiterated today that no hackers were involved. The peer-to-peer VoIP network has 220 million registered users (counting duplicates); 9 million were reported to be online simultaneously Jan. 29, 2007. San Jose, Calif.-based online auctioner eBay bought it two years ago for $2.5 billion in cash and stock.

Skype for business? Not today.

For More:
- Robert McMillan's report on the Russian connection is in InfoWorld here
- Catherine McLean takes a business impact angle in The Globe and Mail here
- Tom Sanders at VNUNet speculates about the cause here
- The Skype blog is here