iOS 11 Bug Crashes iPhones, Makes iMessages And Some Apps Inaccessible

Apple is once again dealing with a devastating bug discovered in iOS that can cause iPhones and iPad to crash and make apps including Messages and a plethora of popular third-party apps inaccessible.

The latest issue, first highlighted by Italian Blog Mobile World and confirmed by multiple sources since its discovery, plagues iPhones and iPads running iOS 11.2.5—the most recent version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

The bug is triggered by sending a message containing an Indian language (Telugu) character to an iOS device. Once that message is received, Apple’s iOS Springboard—an application that manages the iOS home screen—will crash and the Messages app will no longer open.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy fix for the issue once it has been triggered. The only known fix thus far to regain access to the Messages app is to have another person send a message, then open the app and delete the offending message that contains the Telugu character.

Making matters worse for iOS users is the issue isn’t limited to just Messages, the default messaging app from Apple. It extends to third-party applications including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Outlook for iOS and others.

If any of those apps receive a message containing the character that triggers the bug, the app will suffer the same fate as Messages—it will become inaccessible on the device until the message containing the character is removed.

Not all apps are affected by the issue. The Verge reported that Telegram and Skype are unaffected and also noted that the public beta versions of iOS 11.3 is unaffected by the character, suggesting the issue is isolated to iOS 11.2.5 and will be fixed in a future update.

This is not the first time Apple has had issues with uncommon characters. In 2015, it was discovered that a person could freeze an iPhone just by sending a string of uncommon Unicode characters to the device.

A similar issue also plagued iPhones in 2016, when it was discovered that a corrupt video file could be used to cause iPhones to freeze up and forced users to reboot the device to make it function again.

Earlier this year, a software developer discovered it was possible to make iPhones freeze up by sending a simple link to an iPhone owner. The messages app would attempt to preload the link, which could flood the device with unnecessary characters found in the site’s metadata and force the device to shut down.

The issues with iOS have simply compounded for Apple in recent years, as the company has been forced to rush out fixes for bugs that likely should have been caught before being pushed out to the public. The company has vowed not to rush to release features in iOS going forward in hopes of cutting back on cutting corners, which will hopefully result in fewer issues like this one.