This Single Message Can Crash Skype

If you’re sending someone a link in Skype, be careful — a simple typo could crash the program for them.

These eight characters — http://: — when used in any message, can crash Skype for the recipient and, in many cases, require reinstalling the application.

A Skype user discovered the bug by accident and posted about it in a Skype community forum, leading technology blogs to pick up the news. As VentureBeat reports, Skype for Windows is more affected by the issue than Skype for Mac; on the former, receiving or even sending the string of characters will crash the program so badly that it requires reinstallation.

This may remind you of a different messaging bug that was big news a week ago: a specific message, with Arabic characters, that will crash Messages on an iPhone. The difference here is that the string of text that can crash Skype could very easily be sent accidentally.

Apple took a full day to respond to the news of its bug, and it has now released a temporary fix; a Skype team member has already written in the same forum that the company is “aware of the problem and… working to provide an resolution.” For now, reports indicate that the best you can do if you receive the message is ask the sender to delete it, and then re-download the program.