I'd consider this uh, untrue. Didn't happen on the last patch Tuesday, nor the
one before. What made this month special? Did those millions of Windows users
who update all coordinate their activity? Not likely.
As to other services that depends on running on consumers computers to provide
services, there are not many on the scale of Skype that vampire bandwidth and
CPU in the same way. Certainly none of the bit torrent networks crashed, but
then I suspect that they are far more tolerant of user's computers coming and
going, and far less dependent on their persistence.
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---Matthew
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 8/20/2007 at 1:39 PM Steven M. Christey wrote:
The outage being experienced by Skype was apparently due to massive
simultaneous reboots and reconnects after systems installed their
Windows patches.
from http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/what_happened_on_august_16.html:
The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users'
computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they
re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows
Update.
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.
I wonder how many other services are impacted by simultaneous Windows
scheduled updates.
Anyway... given that this was going on at the time the SecurityLab.ru
exploit was released, and the exploit only claims a DoS (and only
seems to make a series of requests to long URIs), was the exploit
actually effective, or was the "DoS" just part of the larger outage?
- Steve
