Skype Fixes Text Chat Bug That Causes Perpetual Crashes

Skype has fixed a bug which caused a number of its applications to crash if a user received a message made up of just eight specific characters.

The issueaffects a number of platforms for the Skype client, including Windows, Android, and iOS. It reportedly does not affect Skype for Windows using the Metro interface, or indeed Skype for Mac.

Bug Fix

“We are aware of a problem that was causing Skype clients to crash,” said Skype on its community forum. “Our engineering teams worked hard to resolve this issue, and have released updates for all impacted Skype platforms.”

The problem was first reported by Venturebeat and occurred when a Skype user inserted or received anything containing the characters “http://:” (without the quotes) in the IM chat function of the client.

Doing that causes Skype to crash, and rebooting doesn’t help either it seems. The Skype client reportedly keeps crashing when the user attempts to sign in again. Clearing the chat history also does not help.

The problem first came to light when a user noted it on the community forums.

“Clearing chat history [does] not help, because when Skype downloads chat history from server, it will crash again,” wrote a person nicknamed Giperion on the Skype community forums.

It should be noted that this problem is different to the Skype chat bug discovered last week, which involves messages featuring specific strings of Arabic, Chinese and other non-Latin characters.

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