According to Skype, the Skype Outage last week was caused by none other than Microsoft - which issued too many patches that rebooted too many computers all over the world at the same time. The Skype Outage really messed things up last week:

"..Some users are able to connect to the Skype network but then are quickly disconnected just minutes later. According to Skype, "We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours.” This has to be the longest Skype outage ever."

Since Skype is used by so many people, many who even gave up phone service and use Skype exclusively - it was a big deal.

"…  explaining to their users that the massive outage that occurred last week was “triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short time-frame as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.”

How come the Skype Outage didn't happen before?   Microsoft is patching up systems like a leaky boat with a thousand holes - you'd think that if this was really the reason for the Skype Outage, the circumstances to make it happen would have taken place long before now.

"…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.

The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.

This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope. We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions. "

I'm glad the Skype Outage ended - I've found I use it a lot too.