If you are a regular Skype user, you must have witnessed sudden crashes of late. Well, you are not alone, as the problem was found to be a widespread among several other users on PC and mobile. To tackle it, Skype rolled out an urgent update in less than 24 hours to fix the endless crash loops.
According to a report by Venture Beat, Skype users found that sending a commonly used eight character code – http://: – triggered the problem and crashed the recipient's app on Windows, Android and iOS devices. However, Skype users on Mac and modern Windows remained unaffected by the bug.
Skype acknowledged the existence of the bug and has rolled out an urgent fix for the problem, pacifying outraged Skype users.
"We are aware of a problem that was causing Skype clients to crash. Our engineering teams worked hard to resolve this issue, and have released updates for all impacted Skype platforms," Skype staff moderator posted on the company's forum early on Wednesday.
Even before Skype rolled out the fix, community members found a workaround by deleting the bad URL from the sender's chat history and installing an older version of Skype. But the workaround was limited to Windows users as Android and iOS smartphones and tablets can only get the latest version of the app from respective app stores. Another solution was to send multiple messages in the text string where the bad URL was shared until the bug code gets moved to the archive.
Luckily, Skype has a simple fix in place. Download the latest version of Skype for Windows from the company's official download site to get rid of the problem. Similarly, Android and iOS users can update their existing app by going to their respective mobile app stores.