Monday, August 20, 2007

Skype is run on Windows servers?

Edit: It appears from the comment I read the article incorrectly, it was the Windows clients rebooting that caused the outage.

I have to admit I have to find that a bit baffling as what is so different with this Windows Update, rebooting's pretty well par for the course and not every Windows machine in the world rebooted at once.

Anyway, there's still lessons to be learned from what happened to Skype.

According to the Skype official blog, the two day outage last week was due to an automatic restart after a Windows Update.

Who'd have thought something like Skype has hosted on servers running Windows?

The lesson here is not to set Windows to reboot automatically after receiving a Windows update.

In fact, no server should automatically install update patches. If the computer is running important functions, each patch should be checked to make sure it won't affect those functions and a "backout" procedure should be enacted so the patches can be undone if they mess the computer up.

All businesses should learn from what happened to Skype.