If anyone was wondering why Skype mysteriously fell into a coma over the weekend, the story is rather amusing. Apparently, we can blame it all on Microsoft. A critical update caused massive numbers of computer users to reset all at once. When the Skype client reloaded upon reset this influx of connections overpowered Skype’s ability to correct for network failures. The result, was a crash.

From The Skype Team

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. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

Web 2.0 Roundup

What we can gain from this is that the internet is an organism. As more applications rely on the stability of the network to function, the tiniest blips in the radar (like a mass reset caused by a Windows update) can lead to chaos. While it is easy to say that software designers should have these things in mind, we can only plan ahead for the scenarios that we can predict. As the complexity of the Internet grows, these scenarios represent a smaller and smaller subset.

What we must do is learn to respond quickly to our customers, so when the inevitable problems occurs they don’t turn into disasters.

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