The Effect of Rebooting after an Update

This is interesting: Imagine the scenario where a huge amount of Windows computers all boot at the same time. What would happen? Well, probably quite some online services would get into troubles with the load they all of a sudden get as the rebooted machines would want to logon all more or less at the same time. Fortunately this scenario is not too likely – or am I wrong? What happens after a Security Update release on the second Tuesday of a month? The machines having Automatic Update switched on will some when install the updates and then, if the use agrees, reboot. Fortunately we have a lot of different time zones across the globe, the computers are sometimes switched off and often the user does not want to reboot now but in a few hours. So, the reboots will be distributed over time, will there?

Hmm, you probably already know where I am heading to: The recent discussions around the Skype outage. It is very interesting to see how the story spins. If a service like Skype goes down, even for a short period of time and even worse for two days, the rumors start to spread from technical problems to hacking attacks to terrorist to worms to Microsoft to whatever (I have not seen the aliens this time J).

Skype posted a blog What happened on August 16th to explain. What is interesting is the statement The high number of restarts [because of customers having patched Windows and booted] affected Skype's network resources which I can technically understand but in the meantime we know that there was nothing different compared to any other Update Tuesday. Skype admitted that the outage finally was caused by a bug in their software.

However, ABC published an article with the title Skype Outage Caused by Microsoft Update
J - interesting, isn't it?

Just to let you know, Microsoft Security Response Center posted as well: Questions about last Tuesday's Release and Skype

Roger