The Skype outage

Posted Aug 23, 2007 2:44 UTC (Thu) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

One of the recurrent question is why the problem only spread 1/2 days after the Tuesday update, and I didn't see anyone notice that not even Microsoft is so naive to have the entire world doing updates at the same time.

In relation to that, one Microsoft security problem I find extremely disturbing is the fact that is normal for security updates for small countries like Portugal to occur, sometimes, 1 month later than the first updates, giving the bad guys lot of time for doing zero day exploits for the "little guys". The reason is probably just having the resources for the quality control team to certify the localized versions of the update, and there isn't enough economic incentive (not enough number of sold licenses) to have an authorized local team (in relation to the "cultural" piracy percentage on the country).

So, it's perfectly possible that one of the peaks of reboots just happen 1 or 2 days latter, as the localized update versions become available.