The possible culprit as to how so many windows clients rebooted at once is Windows Automatic Updates. If you let windows automatically download and install updates, by default your computer will restart itself at 3am two days later to apply the patch. Microsoft posts updates the second tuesday of each month, so the thursday restart coincides perfectly with this. Why this happened now as compared to any other given "patch tuesday" cycle is the big question.

For crying out loud Farhad, don't you read The Register or any other decent IT news website? They've already torn this excuse to shreds in their own discussion section. Of course my fellow Americans are a lot less perspicacious than our European counterparts and therefore they'll take a while to catch up, but I expect a bit less eager credulity on your own part.

Unless you've got a net traffic log in your hands that says enough people logged in after the update at exactly the same time to rival, say, the Eastern Seaboard's typical workday bootup, then this is a just flimsy excuse, cooked up by one group of tech incompentents to placate another.

Is there someone at Salon who reads technical news instead of press clippings? How about giving them a blog?

Turn off autoupdates, autoupdate and BITS services. Run your updates by hand 4 times a year, maximum. There's an excellent chance it will make no difference either way. If you run a good FW and RT malware scanner you're eliminating 99 something % of the potential problems that Windows exposes you to. And the remainder, there's no fix for anyway.

I've never had mass automatic updates go w/o a hitch. There's always something they screw up. For instance, I have one machine which is outwardly identical to its twin, on the same network. There are 4 'security' patches for MS Office it resolutely will not install no matter what. Screw it, it's not that important.

And while we're on the subject - VoIP is one of the most overrated technologies ever. I have a land line phone with flat rate pricing albeit higher than VoIP which is several standard deviations more reliable and the sound quality is far better. VoIP is just a cheaper alternative and you get what you pay for. I am forced to use a VoIP service for work and it sucks. But for the artificially distinct $50 month difference my employer is to make us tolerate it. I on the other hand am 100% happy with my flat rate land line POTS phone that I regularly rack up 7000 minutes a month on.

No other mainline OS in the last oh 30 years (still in service) has with the possible exception of early versions of OS/400. You have to dig real deep to find a z/OS or *nix patch that requires a shutdown restart. I mean we're supposed to pay attention to the Redmond shills who tell us Windows can be embedded in a near real time system? Are they high?

Sounds like Skype is going through some growing pains. Good idea to have an alternate plan in place.

Has anyone else noticed that the illustration for this story is a MacBook Pro and not a Windows machine? It's pretty hard to confuse a Mac with any PC laptop.