Skype To Patch Bug That Sends Instant Messages to Wrong Contacts

Skype is rolling out a fix during the next few days for a bug that resulted in instant messages sometimes being sent to the wrong contact.

The situation was first reported last week on a Skype user support forum. According to Skype, the issue occurs when the program crashes during a Skype instant messaging session, and would cause the last instant message entered or sent prior to the crash being delivered to a different IM contact after the Skype client is rebooted or logged in as a new user.

“Although we cannot determine precisely how many users may have been affected by this error, we believe the number is small, given the very specific circumstances under which the error occurs,” according to a post on the official Skype blog.

The flaw affected only certain versions of Skype, such as Skype 5.10 for Windows, Skype 5.8 for Mac computers, Skype 4.0 for Linux and Skype 1.2 for Windows Phone. The most recent version of the client can be downloaded here.

“During further investigation, we confirmed that not all Skype products were affected by this error as originally reported,” according to the Skype blog. “We can assure that users of Skype 5.9 for Windows, Skype 2.8 for Android and Skype 4.0 for iOS have not been affected. In addition, we have fixed File Sending on the desktop versions of Skype where it was not possible to save files for users who have a hard-disk drive in FAT32 format.”

Skype enables users to communicate by voice, video and instant messaging over the Web. It was purchased in 2011 by Microsoft, which announced July 16 that Microsoft Office 2013 and the cloud-based version of the suite, Office 365, will integrate Office apps such as Microsoft Word and Excel with Skype, as well as Yammer and Perspective Pixel. In late April, Skype was the center of a controversy when a researcher published information about how to secretly get IP information from users with Skype 5.5.