By Sharla SikesLast week’s Skype outage left 220 million of its users temporarily without service, but even after the service was restored, the outage continues to haunt the peer-to-peer VoIP provider.

Yahoo!’s own VoIP service and other VoIP providers enjoyed boosted usage following Skype’s little boo boo.

Beyond that, the outage put a smear on the name of peer-to-peer systems, purported to be resistant to outages like we just saw.

Peer-to-peer applications, which work via clients also acting as servers, seemed foolproof but clearly are not. Can providers truly rely on users’ machines? The glitch wasn’t entirely caused by the user base, but it all brought to light some disturbing drawbacks about P2P applications, and in some users’ minds, VoIP in general.

Skype initially pointed toward a Microsoft update and massive user restarts as the cause of the outage, but now says the outage was its own doing.

While massive user restarts after a typical Microsoft update brought about the crash, it was a weakness in Skype’s system that was the cause, and the patches only the proverbial final straw.

“The Microsoft Update patches were merely a trigger for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it. And Microsoft has been very helpful and supportive throughout,” wrote Skype spokesman Villu Arak in a blog posting.

Microsoft said this month’s patches contained nothing unusual that would cause an outage.

“In a nutshell, there was nothing different or unusual about this month’s patch release,” said Christopher Budd, a security program manager at Microsoft. “The issue was a bug in the Skype software and not related to Tuesday’s updates.”

“We would like to reassure our users across the globe that we have done everything we need to do to make sure this does not happen again,” Arak wrote.

“We have already introduced a number of improvements to our software to ensure our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring.”

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