• Skype Heartbeat, Monday, August 20, 2007 11 AM

Last Thursday, the popular voice over Internet Protocol service Skype suffered a massive network disruption, leaving millions of users unable to make or receive calls, or perform downloads. The eBay unit had little to say about the massive service outage except that it was a software issue that would be resolved in 12-24 hours. In Thursday trading--an up day for the NASDAQ--the auction giant's shares tumbled $2.58 on the news, knocking $1 billion off its market cap, according to TechCrunch.

Om Malik says that eBay's management was nowhere to be found during the crisis, but finally, more than 36 hours after the outage occurred, Skype explained the disruption was caused by the latest Windows update, which resulted in an abnormally high number of restarts over the two days.

Spokesman Villu Arak issued an explanation on Skype's Heartbeat blog, saying the mass restart uncovered "a software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly." The result was a disruption "unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope."

Read the whole story at Skype Heartbeat »