Apple iPhone and iPad users are at high risk of getting their devices crashed by a simple sequence of text and emoji. If you are on the receiving end of this message, it will temporarily freeze your iOS device in a frightening way.
EverythingApplePro's YouTube channel first revealed the iOS bug, which confuses the OS and puts it into a zombie mode. As The Guardian pointed out, there are two ways you can pull off this prank. The first one is by sending a text with a waving white flag emoji, a zero, a rainbow and a hidden character called a variation selector. This particular text string affects only the iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.1 or below.
But if an iPhone is running the latest iOS 10.2, it is still at a risk of being exploited by this bug. To crash an up-to-date iPhone or iPad, you'll need to use the same string of characters but send it as a contact file using iCloud Drive to an iMessage contact. This will do the trick.
Explaining how this simple text sequence can crash any iPhone or iPad, French iOS developer Vincent Desmurs, who claims to have discovered the iOS bug, said, "The text you're copying is actually a waving white flag, VS16, zero, rainbow emoji. What I'm assuming is happening is that the phone tries to combine the waving white flag and the zero into an emoji, but this obviously can't be done."
Apple has, however, not commented on the iPhone-crashing bug.
If you are a victim of this prank, then there's a workaround to stop your iPhone from acting up or constantly booting. Users must delete their iMessage conversation with the prankster to stop repeated crashes, but in most cases the iOS device should eventually unfreeze or start working normally after a reboot. So patience is your best bet in this case.
This new issue brings a déjà-vu effect for many iPhone users. A similar instance had occurred last year, when a sequence of certain string of characters in English, Arabic, Marathi and Chinese crashed an iPhone. Recently, a video surfaced online that would cause iPhones to slow down and temporarily crash the devices when played in Safari.
