Skype Service Outage: not as Skype explains it..?
When the Skype service went down on 22nd December, a connection between recent events clicked into place, which left me pretty sceptical about explanations later given by Skype.
Skype's first response said "Earlier today, we noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn’t typical or expected, so we began to investigate."
In the "Post-mortem" blog update on 29th December, Skype said: "We will also be reviewing our processes for providing ‘automatic’ updates to our users so that we can help keep everyone on the latest Skype software. We believe these measures will reduce the possibility of this type of failure occurring again."
But the fact is, Skype had been upgrading users' machines without their permission for a week or more before the outage. I have several PCs, and Skype is installed on all of them. On the first, Skype was upgraded automatically to an obnoxious and intrusive new version.
I am usually careful about setting auto-update to "off" on applications... I want to be involved in what's being installed on my systems and when it's being installed. So I was miffed when the first PC was "upgraded" without my say so. I looked all through the options several times to find some way of switching off automatic upgrade for the future, but there was none.
I checked other PCs and saw they did have some way of turning off automatically upgrading, and I made sure that the setting was off. So when a second PC upgraded automatically, I was pretty angry, to say the least... to the point of considering whether I should be migrating away from Skype for the future.
I caught the third PC as the upgrade was being downloaded, found that it was being installed by a separate executable program and terminated it; removed it from the disk, put another file of the same name in its place and locked it.
It surely has to be illegal for a program to download a program of tens of megabytes onto a user's PC and install it, when they have explicitly denied permission to do so.
Anyway, as I said, I was sceptical on 22nd December when Skype talked about an unexpected fall in the number of users due to a bug in client software; and having seen the blog saying effectively (in the future tense) that they are looking at ways to force users to upgrade, I know they're lying... it's a decision that was already taken and actioned before the outage.
Skype's first response said "Earlier today, we noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn’t typical or expected, so we began to investigate."
In the "Post-mortem" blog update on 29th December, Skype said: "We will also be reviewing our processes for providing ‘automatic’ updates to our users so that we can help keep everyone on the latest Skype software. We believe these measures will reduce the possibility of this type of failure occurring again."
But the fact is, Skype had been upgrading users' machines without their permission for a week or more before the outage. I have several PCs, and Skype is installed on all of them. On the first, Skype was upgraded automatically to an obnoxious and intrusive new version.
I am usually careful about setting auto-update to "off" on applications... I want to be involved in what's being installed on my systems and when it's being installed. So I was miffed when the first PC was "upgraded" without my say so. I looked all through the options several times to find some way of switching off automatic upgrade for the future, but there was none.
I checked other PCs and saw they did have some way of turning off automatically upgrading, and I made sure that the setting was off. So when a second PC upgraded automatically, I was pretty angry, to say the least... to the point of considering whether I should be migrating away from Skype for the future.
I caught the third PC as the upgrade was being downloaded, found that it was being installed by a separate executable program and terminated it; removed it from the disk, put another file of the same name in its place and locked it.
It surely has to be illegal for a program to download a program of tens of megabytes onto a user's PC and install it, when they have explicitly denied permission to do so.
Anyway, as I said, I was sceptical on 22nd December when Skype talked about an unexpected fall in the number of users due to a bug in client software; and having seen the blog saying effectively (in the future tense) that they are looking at ways to force users to upgrade, I know they're lying... it's a decision that was already taken and actioned before the outage.
posted by Tsuchan at 7:52 am
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