Skype Preview App Causing Problems For WP8; Disconnects Chat, Crashes Tiles, Blocks Texts…+ How To Fix

Over the past couple of days my Lumia 920 has been acting very strange, in a very bad way. Tile shortcuts would crash and redirect me to the homescreen, push notifications would be delayed, text messages fail to send, Caller ID no longer works (outgoing and incoming calls show up as unknown numbers), Email would get stuck syncing; and a boat load of problems. At first I attributed all these to buggy OS that I could only hope to be resolved in the upcoming update, however a new “symptom” showed up where the phone would refuse to sign into chat. Including Facebook chat and Rooms chat, interestingly this wasn’t limited to the phone but using the Live ID from anywhere  including the desktop client on Windows 8 and the browser chat on outlook.com would refuse to sign in.

Apparently others have had this problem and the most likely culprit is Skype, a thread posted on the Skype discussion forum takes the blame stating a simple solution it Uninstall Skype  force refresh your accounts (Settings–> account–> Long press on each account & refresh, then Reboot and if you like re-install Skype. 

If you are experiencing crashes in the People or Messaging Hubs or having email sync issues after installing the Skype for Windows Phone 8 Preview then firstly, sincere apologies for the problems that you have experienced.

Secondly, our current understanding of this platform bug is that if you uninstall the Skype app, then force a sync of all accounts, and then reinstall the Skype app, the problem should not recur.

We are eager to hear any experiences in this thread after following this process for users who have experienced this issue.

Unfortunately although the symptoms fit my device perfectly, the solution did not work. Yesterday I temporarily fixed the issue by forcing all accounts to sign out (by changing the password) then signing in again, that only worked for a couple of hours (or less) before it went back to failing to connect.

If the official solution did not work for you try these alternate fixes that hopefully might fix your problems (although they didn’t fix mine):

• Preform the same reboot/uninstall detailed above except  when rebooting the device turn on flight mode (shuts down WiFi & Cellular Data), then after reboot turn off Flight mode and force account sync. (that seems to have fixed the problem for some users).
• A second tweak is to unlink your Skype account from your Live ID (unlinks any linked contacts etc.) by going to skype.com, signing in and under “account” choose “Unlink Microsoft account”; then uninstall/reboot with flight mode on.

Hopefully that’ll fix it for anyone who has the same issue, and if anyone has a second possible fix do let us know in the comments down below.

Read the official discussion thread at Skype discussions and Microsoft forums here:

Skype: http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-Phone/People-Hub-Messaging-Crashes-after-installing-Skype-for-WP8/td-p/1213804/highlight/true

Microsoft: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/winphone/forum/wp8-wpemail/accounts-in-wp8-keeps-syncing-apps-crashing/590b5a19-a72b-4570-a59e-05e29b5f6ffa?

Category: Applications, Lumia, Nokia, Windows Phone