Here's how to crash and fix your Skype account
It looks like the Messages app isn’t the only program that can be crashed with a simple string of characters. According to a recent report from Venture Beat, Skype can be rendered useless with a string of eight characters that are much more likely to show up by accident than the string of letters, numbers, and symbols that causes problems in the Messages app. What’s more, Skype’s bug affects almost all of the service’s client apps.
Skype user Giperion first posted the issue in the service’s community forums. He discovered that sending the characters “http://:” (without the quotes) would crash Skype. Even worse, receiving the offending characters causes the app to crash whenever you try to sign in again. Trying to switch to a different Skype client, like from Windows to iOS, doesn’t help a bit. The app crashes as soon as it loads your chat history.
The bug affects Skype clients for Windows, Android, and iOS. Interestingly, it does not appear to bother Skype for Mac or the Metro Windows client. A spokesperson for Skype confirmed on June 2 they were aware of the problem and were working on a solution. Soon after, Skype released updates for all of the affected client apps. To fix the problem, tap on this link to go to App Store’s page for Skype, then tap Update.
Skype is a free download on the App Store, and offers in-app purchases to be used in making international phone calls. The app requires iOS 7.0 or later, and is compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple Watch.
For more on the new features in the updated Skype app, see Brent Dirks’s article.