Skype is back in business after its service outage last Thursday, for a period up to 36 hours, and this caused million of users can’t logged in to the service last week. Though this morning I read eBay’s explanation (English) and (Mandarin), I believed many users still wondering what was the main reason that caused this worst outage in Skype’s five year history. Unlike any other service disruption, Skype said the disruption was due to a large number of Skype users restarting their computers after installing the routine Windows update on the second Tuesday of every month. In Skype’s post, they didn’t mentioned precisely what in particular about the August’s update has led to the Skype crash and indeed this kind of vague explanation on this issue outlines the necessity of another round of explanation.

“Windows Updates” was the key feature of Microsoft’s OS strategy. It cost Microsoft a certain amount of money to set up their team in developing the security patches in a “periodic” time frame in spite of us, as the users sometimes didn’t realized whether these updates really meet our own computing demand. However, for Skype service outage, and their explanation for this was due to the Windows periodic updates nonetheless remained controversial. Will it served as an unexpected boon to some of the Skype peer-to-peer competitors? Well, time will tell.