Network World reports that the massive user reboots that occurred after Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates were installed on August 14th were responsible for taking the network offline for two days. The New York Times reported that Skype users in Colombia, Brazil, Germany, Finland and the United States all reported difficulties logging on. Skype, which is popular with consumers and small to medium sized businesses, reported it had 220 million registered user accounts at the end of Q2 2007. And, since being purchased by eBay, Skype has been eying the corporate market. However, reliability problems such as those that occurred after Microsoft Patch Tuesday could serve as a major deterrent for large corporations who may have been considering adopting the Skype peer-to-peer VoIP services.

It seems odd on the surface that a simultaneous reboot would affect the Skype system, but when you consider that each user’s computer represents a node on the system, perhaps it’s not so much of a stretch. According to Skype spokesman Villa Arak, in addition to tying up user machines, the restarts were clustered and triggered a flood of log-in requests in a short time frame, and these requests overwhelmed the network.

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