Text Message Bug Causes iPhones to Crash; How to Fix it Here

You've probably heard of that mysterious text message that could, in a snap, crash an iPhone that has received it. You or someone you know have probably tried the trick out on an unused iPhone to see whether it's real. Perhaps you've even seen the videos demonstrating this phenomenon. But you'll probably not find it funny if you're one of those who've been pranked with the said killer message.

So, in case you do get one of those, how do you fix your iPhone?

Right now, there's pretty much just one way to do that. Unless Apple announces another solution.

The Telegraph advised that, in order to avoid the message-initiated crash, you should turn off Message notifications. You'll find that when you go to settings, click on Notifications, click on Messages, and "slide across the button that says 'Allow Notifications' until it is no longer green."

Meanwhile, Apple has said it is working on a fix for the strange bug making the rounds on a number of iPhones recently, according to Tech Crunch, which said "sending a reply message to fix the problem" reportedly works.

"Affected users can send another message to themselves (which you can do via Siri or by sharing from within another app, like Photos), or having another person send you a message instead," the site added. "After you've done this, you can go back into the Message app and delete the conversation."

The site went on to reveal that not all iPhone users are affected by the glitch, which means that it affects units with certain iOS versions or settings.

"A Reddit user speculates that it's related to how banner notifications process Unicode text," Tech Crunch said.

The message merely consists of "two English words, a string of Arabic characters that appears to have no meaning, and a Japanese character," CNN Money observed. However, it is capable of crashing an Apple smartphone, with some users even saying that they can no longer access their messages. Despite this, the bug is not considered malicious, just annoying.

Right now, it's hard to know why this string causes the crash. The news source had quoted Apple as saying that the Cupertino-based company is "aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters, and we will make a fix available in a software update."

It's also still not clear whether this code was "stumbled on" or was created with malicious intent. What is known is that it had begun in a Reddit forum.

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