Skype user "Giperion" has posted on the Skype community forums about an eight-character bug that crashes the Skype application on Android, iOS, and Windows desktop.
The popular video chat and messaging service app crashes when signing in after the user has sent or received a message with the characters "https://:". However, the bug does not affect the Skype for Mac and the modern Windows app available for download on Windows Store.
Sending from or to Skype for Windows is sufficient to crash the Windows client, but sending the message from iOS or Android does not crash the mobile apps but receiving the message on mobile platforms will. To make problems worse, once an app has been affected by that string of characters, it will drive into an endless loop of crashes when a user starts it up, rendering the app useless unless a fix or update is rolled out by the company.
Giperion noted that deleting the chat history is not a solution because Skype automatically downloads chat history from its server, which would just crash the app again. Interestingly, the thread has been deleted for unknown reasons.
A Skype spokesperson issued an email statement that the company is already aware of the bug problem and that it has been working on a fix that will resolve the issue. No timeline was given and details were not provided why the specific string of characters crashes the app.
Another Skype user "Lazymax" provided a temporary workaround by asking the Skype message sender to delete the glitch message and reinstall an older version of Skype. This apparently works on Windows desktop where one can easily uninstall version 7.x and reinstall version 6.x. However, this solution will not work for iOS and Android since their respective app stores make sure that the latest version of apps are the ones available for download.
The concern is almost similar to the problem with Apple's Messages app on iOS, which also crashes and declines to run when users receive a specific string of Arabic characters. However, that challenge is more simply solved as users just need to reply to the message using Siri, and people who do not type in Arabic cannot be affected, unless one of their associates decides to perform a prank.
The iOS Messages glitch might have been more forgivable and understandable since it comprises Unicode, which is not that easy to implement. With Skype, checking against a distorted URL like "https://:" is something so basic that it is somehow confusing that this troublesome bug got through the QA of the company.
Photo: Tsahi Levent-Levi | Flickr
