Hi Folks,

I was amused (though also sad) to read of the reasons why Skype went off the air for two days at the end of last week. I quote from their explanation:

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.

The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

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.

Since Skype typically has upward of 5 million users online at a time, one cam imagine the effect if they all rebooted within an hour or so!

But what a lovely DOS mechanism! (Not for nothing, methinks, was M$'s first operating system called MS-DOS -- though the DOS boot was then on the other foot).

Best wishes to all, Ted.

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