News

Microsoft On Skype Outage: Don't Blame Us

Microsoft's official stance on the recent Skype outage that left millions of users without phone access for two days last week? "Hey, it's not our fault."

The outage, which began last Thursday and continued into Friday, resulted from a bug in Skype's software that wasn't able to handle the flood of system reboots from users following Microsoft's August Patch Tuesday release.

Christopher Budd, part of the Microsoft Security Response Team, stated in a blog entry that the released patches weren't the cause of the outage. "We checked to see if there were any issues introduced by the security updates that could have caused the situation, and we found that there were no issues introduced by the security updates themselves," he stated.

Skype agreed with that assessment. In a blog entry on the failure, Skype spokesperson Villu Arak said "We don't blame anyone but ourselves. The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst -- a trigger -- for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it."

Budd said in the blog that, from Microsoft's end, it was a typical Patch Tuesday. "We confirmed that there is nothing unusual in this month's release that could have contributed to this situation. From a release point of view, this month's release followed our usual format and processes." It was the largest number of patches released for a number of months, but Microsoft has had that large a release, and larger, in the past.

Again, Arak agreed and exonerated Microsoft. "In short -- there was nothing different about this set of Microsoft patches," he wrote.

In addition, it doesn't appear that the patches caused any widespread problems with other vendors' products.

Budd said Microsoft is very careful in determining the possible affects of patches. "We are always watching for any issues that could have an impact on deploying the security updates, and overall, our ongoing monitoring of the last week's release shows that the deployment of updates is going smoothly," he wrote.

But do Skype users have anything to worry about regarding future Microsoft patch releases? Arak said no. "The bug [that caused the outage] has been squashed ...We'd like to reassure our users across the globe that we've done everything we need to do to make sure this doesn't happen again."

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

Featured

  • Microsoft Offers Support Extensions for Exchange 2016 and 2019

    Microsoft has introduced a paid Extended Security Update (ESU) program for on-premises Exchange Server 2016 and 2019, offering a crucial safety cushion as both versions near their Oct. 14, 2025 end-of-support date.

  • An image of planes flying around a globe

    2025 Microsoft Conference Calendar: For Partners, IT Pros and Developers

    Here's your guide to all the IT training sessions, partner meet-ups and annual Microsoft conferences you won't want to miss.

  • Notebook

    Microsoft Centers AI, Security and Partner Dogfooding at MCAPS

    Microsoft's second annual MCAPS for Partners event took place Tuesday, delivering a volley of updates and directives for its partners for fiscal 2026.

  • Microsoft Layoffs: AI Is the Obvious Elephant in the Room

    As Microsoft doubles down on an $80 billion bet on AI this fiscal year, its workforce reductions are drawing scrutiny over whether AI's ascent is quietly reshaping its human capital strategy, even as official messaging avoids drawing a direct line.