LUXEMBOURG, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- A "massive," nearly simultaneous restart of computers using Windows caused a worldwide Skype Internet phone-call crash, the Luxembourg company said Monday.
The two-day outage, which ended Saturday, left an estimated 5 million to 6 million Skype users unable to log on to make phone calls or send instant messages.
The disruption, which has been fixed, "was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short time frame as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," employee Villu Arak wrote on Skype's Heartbeat blog.
Microsoft Corp. released its monthly patches, or programs used to repair software problems, Tuesday. Patch installation, which many computers do automatically, requires a computer restart.
"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," Arak wrote.
No malicious activities were identified and no user's security was at risk, Arak's entry said.
Skype has already introduced software improvements "to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring," Arak's entry said.
The last time 4-year-old Skype had a major outage was October 2005, when its service was down for a few hours.
