By Sharla Sikes

It’s so easy to do. The software behemoth makes such an easy target for all of the computing world’s ills. But this time, we actually CAN blame Microsoft—indirectly, at least—for leaving 220 million Skype users without service.

The peer-to-peer VoIP service, based in Luxembourg, says that massive numbers of users restarting their PCs after a Microsoft update caused the two-day crash.

Skype’s service was interrupted Thursday, and wasn’t 100 percent back online until Saturday.

Skype employee Villu Arak blogged 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.”

Microsoft released its monthly patches and updates last week, which requires the users to restart their computers.

“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,” Arak wrote.

Millions of users restarting their computers after installing the Microsoft patches revealed a bug in the “self-healing” function of Skype’s network resource software.

The bug wasn’t planted by hackers, Arak said, and assures users that they are not at risk of security breaches.

The outage was the first since Oct. 2005 for Skype.

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