Skype says its two-day outage was caused by a batch of Windows Updates downloading and then resetting users' machines on Thursday.

The result, it says, was that "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". Talking purely in terms of the information Skype has given the public, I don't believe it.

Why? Well, the batch of Windows Updates was released on Tuesday, Patch Tuesday as it's commonly known. Maybe they didn't quite make it then for the UK - after all, we're a few hours behind the US. But I think they dripped onto my home PC on Wednesday night as I turned it off and according to my Vista machine here at work, the batch of updates also arrived on Wednesday 15th.

So surely by Thursday most people would have already got them? And, if a mass download was to cause problems surely it would have happened on Tuesday? It's certainly an interesting little conundrum of time.