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Patch Tuesday became a Friday the 13th for Skype this month, as a Windows Update devastated Skype's authentication network.

Skype Brought Down By Microsoft Update

Skype has blamed the routine installation of updates from Microsoft for a massive outage in August. The company's Villu Arak has been blogging about the issue since its beginning, and recently provided an update on the cause of the Skype outage:

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.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt 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.

Skype's members were without service for a couple of days until the cause of the problem became clear, and engineers could address it.

Some speculated that the outage had been the work of an attack against Skype's assets. Arak stated as he has previously that "no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk."