LONDON: Skype said it has now released an update for the bug that crashed the video chat. But while the Apple bug involved a string of Chinese, Arabic and Marathi characters unlikely to be used together (except when deliberately trying to crash someone’s phone), all that’s needed to trigger the Skype shutdown is the characters “http://:”.
Duplicated colon aside, that text, denoting “hypertext transfer protocol”, is the simple command at the start of every web URL which directs our browsers into the world wide web.
Ergo, it’s not impossible to unwittingly type it into a Skype chat box while trying to send a website link to a friend only to have the app suddenly crash on them before you’ve had a chance to wish them happy birthday.
The bug affects the Skype app on iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows devices, according to The Guardian, and continues to crash the app even when relaunched, thanks to Skype thoughtfully loading text from previous chat sessions each time you log in.
Skype said it has now released an update for the bug.
“We are aware of a problem that was causing Skype clients to crash,” a representative posted on the company’s community forum.
“Our engineering teams worked hard to resolve this issue, and have released updates for all impacted Skype platforms.”
The fix can be be found here.
Another workaround is to get the sender of the bad phrase to delete it from their chat, or; get them to send multiple messages so the problem text is pushed back into the conversation archive.
