Sending a message brings Skype into an endless crash loop

The eight-character string “http://:” brings Skype into Endless Crash Loop, and once they’re in the user’s chat history, the app can’t start again.

A few days ago we discussed about a problem occurred to iPhone and iPad users, their mobile devices were crashing after the reception of a specifically crafted text message, now a similar problem has been discovered by Skype users.

The popular video chat and messaging service is affected by a bug that crashes almost every version of Skype, on both desktop and mobile platform, with a single message composed of eight characters. The bug was first reported by the user Giperion, who noted that sending “http://:” would crash the Skype app endlessly for the sender of the message containing the specific text string, as well as the receiver.

This time the impact on end-user is more serious, in order to restore a normal situation, it is necessary to reinstall the client, the flaw is triggered by sending the following message:

‘http://:’ (without the quotes)

This means that just receiving a message containing the text string “http://:” during a normal conversation, it reportedly crashes Skype when running on Windows, Android, or iOS operating system. Deleting user’s chat history doesn’t solve the problem, because the Skype client re-downloads this data from the cloud every time you start the app.

The news of the crash is also reported in the Skype community, according the company Skype app for Mac and the recent version of Skype app for Windows 8.1 aren’t  affected by the bug. VentureBeat tested the existence of the bug on Skype for Android, Windows, and iOS and confirmed that the problem affects them.

“Skype for Android and iOS both fall into endless crash loops.” 

A spokesperson for Skype has confirmed the bug and reported that the experts of the company are “aware of the problem and are working to provide a resolution.”