Skype Down Again – Apps Crashing – Skype Releases Fix

It’s happened again, but this time it looks a lot more serious. Not only is the service unreachable for millions of Users, the app seems to be crashing, and not as it first seemed for just windows users, its happening on OSX and Unix Servers.

Skype have been quick to report an apparent fix which is posted below, but they’ve also been quick to report that they are still investigating the reason for the crash.

The Skype website is up and down currently.

This comes just a couple of weeks after Microsoft bought Skype for an inflated $8.5bn and many are already speculating that this outage is connected to the takeover.

June 7th Update: As of 90 minutes ago, Skype has gone down again. As was confirmed last week, the problem the last time was a bug in the Microsoft Windows Client. However, the fix posted below has not fixed anything this time round and skype is still down after re-running the tasks.. This means that it is more than likely a network issue. Personally I think its amazing how such events like these effect so many millions of people who rely on such a service on a day to day basis (including myself) Let’s hope its not a repeat of the extended downtime of December 2010!

Quick Fix Instructions via Skype.

Windows Vista and Windows 7

(1) Close Skype.
a. Right-click the Skype icon in the system tray (at the bottom right of the screen)
b. Choose Quit.
(2) Ensure that “Show hidden files and folders” is switched on.
a. Click Start, type run and press Enter.
b. Type control folders and click OK.
c. Select the View tab and ensure relevant entry is enabled.
(3) Locate the shared.xml file.
a. Click Start, type run and press Enter.
b. Type %appdata%skype and click OK.
c. Delete the shared.xml file.
(4) Restart Skype. The shared.xml file will be recreated.

Windows XP

(1) Close Skype.
a. Right-click the Skype icon in the system tray (at the bottom right of the screen)
b. Choose Quit.
(2) Ensure that “Show hidden files and folders” is switched on.
a. Click Start and then Run…
b. Type control folders and click OK.
c. Select the View tab and ensure relevant entry is enabled.
(3 ) Locate the shared.xml file.
a. Click Start and then Run…
b. Type %appdata%skype and click OK.
c. Delete the shared.xml file.
(4 ) Restart Skype. The shared.xml file will be recreated.

Mac OS X

1. Quit Skype.
2. Go to the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Skype/
3. Delete the file shared.xml (it will be recreated once you open Skype again, this is fine).
4. Start Skype.

Please note that the ~ sign means your home folder. You can find your home folder by opening Finder and selecting Go > Home from the menu bar or pressing Command (Apple), Shift and H keys at the same time.

Updated: This fix worked for both Windows 7 and Windows XP for this writer.