There's a nasty new iPhone bug doing the rounds: It's a string of characters that, when sent in a message, crashes the recipient's phone.
We first heard about the issue on 9to5Mac, and it apparently affects only iPhone-to-iPhone communication. After receiving a text with the particular string of characters, Messages will reportedly crash repeatedly. It can also force iPhones to reboot in some circumstances.
Here's the text that is reportedly causing the bug:effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗
For what it's worth, we've tried to replicate the bug and can't manage it — suggesting that it doesn't necessarily affect all iPhones. But comments on social media show that it's definitely for an issue for many:
On Reddit, one user theorises that it's caused by a failure to render unicode properly — "[causing] messages to take up a lot more memory than normal, leading to iOS killing the largest process," and thus crashing.
And as 9to5Mac notes, this isn't the first time this has happened. In 2013, the tech blog reported on how certain Arabic characters could cause issues in both iOS 6 and OS X 10.8.
If you've been affected, Forbes has a suggestion on how to fix the issue and let you reopen Messages: Either "have the person who pranked you send another message," or "send yourself a message through Siri or your Mac."
We've reached out to Apple about a fix and will update if it responds.
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