iOS Text Bomb Bug: Users Are Crashing iPhones Through Social Media

Shortly after a new bug was discovered that could crash iPhones by making the phones try to display a single character, people began posting the character on social media with so-called “text bombs” in attempts to crash as many phones as possible.

Motherboard reported the behavior of users, who have exploited the bug by putting the offending character in their usernames. They then send a user a notification by liking a tweet, which can cause the Twitter app to become unresponsive and can crash iPhones.

The “text bombs” are the result of an ongoing issue with iOS 11.2.5 that was first discovered earlier this week. 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.

Affected apps include Apple’s own Messages and Mail, as well as third-party applications including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Slack, Instagram, Google Chrome, Outlook for iOS and Twitter. Some users have also reported the issue makes Uber unusable, as well.

Reports have indicated the issue with the Telugu character is not present in beta versions of iOS 11.3, suggesting the problem is isolated to just devices running iOS 11.2.5—the most recent version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

Earlier this week, Twitter released an update for its iOS app that purportedly fixes “a crash that affects users of right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew,” but it appears that issue is unrelated to the problem caused by the Telugu character. That bug is still present after the update and appears to relate entirely to how iOS handles the character rather than the individual app.

Apple is reportedly aware of the issue and is working on a patch to fix the problem.

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 adjusted its approach and has promised 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.