Many have since fallen victims to this specially crafted sequence of Unicode bug. It is believed that when this malicious string of characters is sent in a text message, it will crash an iThing when the text is displayed as a notification on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple watch.
Not iMessages alone, Snapchat and Twitter on iOS devices are also vulnerable to this iPhone crash text bug as they also use the CoreText component to display text on-screen.
Here's the unique text that's causing the iPhone crash:
effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗
It's been really annoying that people all across the world are messaging each other the secret string of unique characters that resets the phone, causing it to turn on and off.
There isn't any official fix from Apple so far, however the company has released a statement saying how to fix your crashed phone if it is sent the malicious text.
"Apple 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," the company says. "Until the update is available, you can use these steps to re-open the Messages app."
Here's a three-step process to combat the issue:
You can do this simple workaround in the meantime before Apple patches the bug in order to open your Messages app:
- Ask Siri to "read unread messages."
- Use Siri to reply to the malicious message. After you reply, you'll be able to open Messages again.
- If the issue continues, tap and hold the malicious message, tap More, and delete the message from the thread.
Following these simple steps would let you successfully access your Messages again. However, this procedure will provide only a temporary fix for the iPhone crash text bug.
Apple has yet to release an update to fully address the issue exploited by the killer Unicode string, and hopefully we get a real fix for this issue soon.
