This is both scary and hilarious at the same time. I’m not a Skype user, so this hasn’t affected me at all. But apparently the huge number of Skype users rebooting last week, due to the patches released by Microsoft on Tuesday, set off a nasty chain of events. First of all, when all these systems came back up, each one attempted to log back in to Skype, causing a huge load on their servers. Coupled with the fact that Skype relies on a peer-to-peer architecture, and since the majority of their users were temporarily down for reboots, they simply could not handle the number of requests. This prevented users from getting back on Skype, and therefore prevented the recovery of the peer-to-peer network.
Skype may want to change their architecture slightly, so that users can initially join the network without logging in, and possibly allow not-yet-authenticated users to accept incoming data connections.
There is a good post about this topic on Security Fix.
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