Skype Patches The Bug Causing Its App To Crash After Users Received A Simple Message

Skype today has rolled out a fix for the bug that has been causing its client software applications to repeatedly crash if users received a particular string of characters as a message. If someone messaged you with the characters “http://” (without the quotes), Skype would crash and then not allow you to sign in again upon re-opening the application.

News of the bug’s existence follows that of a similar bug reported to affect iMessage, SMS and other texting clients on iPhones, which Apple acknowledged and promised to address in a forthcoming software update.

However, unlike the iPhone bug which involved sending a string of Arabic characters to crash a victim’s phone, the Skype bug could easily be a typo in a normal text chat between friends.

The bug was first discovered by a Skype user “Giperion” who posted details on Skype’s community forums. (The post has since been removed.) The issue affected a number of Skype software client applications, including certain versions that run on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. At the time of the bug’s discovery, the only solution was to reinstall the Skype application after first asking the person who sent you the string of characters to delete their message.

To Microsoft’s credit, the Skype team quickly addressed the situation. Initially, Skype began to filter out the characters in messages users were sending across some of its platforms. And today, the company has released an updated version of its client software for all impacted Skype platforms.

On the website, users can now grab the latest version of the Skype software for the platforms that need to be patched. This will resolve the issue, the company says. Users won’t need to uninstall their Skype software application in order to proceed – they can just update the app currently installed on their computer or mobile device.