Skype puts the blame on M$, of course it was. .

[Justin]

After recovering from a major crash this weekend Skype is now pointing fingers, saying that "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." Their official statement sounds like the BBC announcing the Nazi invasion of Poland.

[Text follows]
    On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. 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.

    Normally Skype's peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

    The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk.

    This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope.  We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions.

    We are very proud that over the four years of its operation, Skype has provided a technically resilient communications tool to millions of people worldwide.  Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring.

    The Skype community of users has been incredibly supportive and we are very grateful for all their good wishes.

[Skype]

[DaijoubuKun]

Speaking on Skype.  Some Linux user using the Apparmor program have found that skype for Linux requires access to files like /etc/passwd (totally unnecessary!) as well as files from your mozilla (firefox) plugins directory.  There are more, but I can't remember most of them... That sounds like spyware to me.

For those who know Linux and most Linux users, a program reading your /etc/passwd file can be very bad.  That file contains passwords are all system accounts.  Even tho the passwords are hashed (encrypted) users will commonly use the same logins for their machines and online.  I believe this is skype's way to getting your password and the hashed passord from /etc/passwd, figuring out the algorithm (it's not hard) and decrypting your root password.  This would allow them (or anyone else) to access your machine!

For Shame!