August 16th, the doomsday for some

From Skype.com blog:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. 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.

In next paragraphs author says that Windows Update and systems self-reboot triggered a bug in their software which caused Skype to become unstable for 2 days.

Poor, poor Skype. Do they really rely on public Windows boxes so heavily and don't have any patches control system? The best practise is always test before deployment. Test, test, test! Always! Later is always too late. Obviously, Skype forgot about something...

We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions.

Sure, nobody's perfect.

It's a very good lesson for all service providers. You never know your service until you're in big trouble and looking for a needle in a hay stack under high pressure and calling investors.