These 8 characters crash Skype, and once they’re in your chat history, the app can’t start

Skype users have discovered a rather nasty bug in the app. Sending the characters “http://:” (without the quotes) crashes Skype, and receiving a message with those characters makes it crash any time you try to sign in again.

We learned of the issue when Skype user “Giperion” posted on it in the community forums. He noted that “clearing chat history not helps, because when skype download chat history from server, it will crash again.”

This not only crashed the Windows app but it also killed it for good. Now every time I open Skype (which is set to automatically sign me in), it launches and then quickly crashes.