Skype: What happened on August 16 | Hacker News Reader

Skype: What happened on August 16

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17 pointspiers10 comments

<quote>receiving a routine software update</quote>

Sounds like they're pointing the finger at microsoft to me.

This in my view confirms that the people who run Skype are either incompetent, dishonest, or both. I'm leaning towards dishonest, since it's hard to imagine how anyone could be so incompetent to both (a) roll out a network to millions of nodes without simulating how the network responds to major disruptions, and (b) build a large system which cannot be promptly "rebooted" into a clean state if anything goes wrong.

The alternative explanation -- that Skype was the target of a deliberate attack, and they're trying to keep quiet about this -- is to my paranoid mind far easier to believe; Skype would hardly be the first multi-billion dollar company to keep quiet about an attack out of fear that shareholders and/or customers would react unfavourably.

When is the last time someone launched a massively successful attack like the one on Skype without claiming credit for it?

Napoleon once said, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

What makes you think that whoever launched this attack against Skype (assuming that it was an attack) hasn't taken credit for it? Denial of service extortion (historically, most often against online gambling websites) is a thriving business; but you don't need to take credit publicly to get paid. There's also the possibility of profitting from Skype's outage without even taking credit privately, simply by using the advance knowledge that an attack will take place to make profitable trades on the stock market.

I see. So the Skype PR team was sitting around, possibly even delaying the relaunch...

- Harp plays, scene fades in -

"Neil, what's going on with the spin? We need that spin! We've just finished hiding the build numbers. Marketing has never been happier, so we can't afford anyone to know that we've been attacked now!" yelled Niklas, his ears flattening against his head. Being Supreme Skype Commander was hard work, and it was not made easier by this doofus from PR.

Neil glanced back, mildly annoyed. "I'm workin' on it, I'm workin' on it. Okay, hey, guys, a meteor. No wait, Velociraptors. Damn, no.."

They were all huddled in the conference room. Management had commanded them to stay late two days in a row now, until 6 PM. No one wanted to stay an hour late another day.

Suddenly, Tamma burst in. "I've got it! There was a windows update! It happened to coincide with the attack. We're saved!"

Everyone cheered, picking Tamma up and carrying her high in the air. Neil remained seated, slumped, head down.

"I still liked the Velociraptors.." he mumbled.

"Me TOO!" It came from behind him.

Neil had just enough time to turn around and scream in shock and horror before the Velociraptor jumped on him.

- Harp plays again, scene fades out -

I'm thinking no.

Supposedly competent people trade billions of dollars daily based on models without looking beyond possible disruptions a few perceived standard deviations out. Heck, some hardy souls even drive across Minnesota bridges without much prior modeling. 4 years of smooth sailing before a major crash have been quite profitable for Skype, and has given them the resources to allegedly fix this problem, and the mindshare and market penetration to survive it.

Is there any good reason why MS couldn't spread their default auto reboot times out a bit? Or could the Skype installer request it randomly changed? I'm not really all that familiar with Skype or network security. Could such staggered reboots for example allow attackers to look at fixes early and launch a quick attack, hence be unacceptable to MS? If not, it sure seems like they would make life a lot easier on realtime P2P networks dependent on consumer desktop availability.

Also, any company being dishonest about technical matters is soon left with only incompetent tech people. So if Skype is dishonest, they are likely incompetent as well.

i dont understand why people are giving skype such a bad time. they have been quite honest (technically) about what happened - a bug got exposed by some really really extreme workload. Also, whoever thinks that they should have "modeled" this has no idea how hard it is to develop distributed systems. It's a fine ideal to have, but in practice it is ridiculously hard to achieve. Especially as the code evolves. What you need is the same code base being able to run on a real TCP/IP stack and in a simulated environment. This looks easy in the abstract, but it's really tricky to do in practice.

<quote>receiving a routine software update</quote>

Sounds like they're pointing the finger at microsoft to me.

Sometimes "a routine software update" means "not a routine software update."

This is going to serve as a lesson on how not to communicate a screw up to your customers in the modern age.

What could have simply been, "we screwed up, we're sorry" is now going to be talked about not only in terms of the event, but the poor communication strategy.

tsk tsk skype.

In other news, Microsoft announces a new peer-to-peer telephone network!

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