If you own an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you could be in for a frustrating next few days as a string of text included as part of a notification will crash any of those devices. And as you’ve probably guessed, news of this text is going viral, which leads to it being used even more.
As 9To5Mac reports, the text includes characters written in the Sindhi language combined with the emoji for the Italian flag (although the flag emoji isn’t necessarily required as this video on Twitter demonstrates). For some reason, the text is causing Apple’s hardware to either crash or stop responding to input if they receive a notification containing the sequence. All you can do when that happens is reboot your device and things should return to normal.
What makes the situation worse, is the fact the text string can be sent from any app, be that first or third-party. And the “bug” is going to frustrate a lot of users because being exposed to it is out of their control. You can’t easily stop messages being sent to you, however, you can disable notifications on your device. It’s undesirable to do so, but if you’re receiving regular notifications that crash your device, it might be the lesser of two evils for now.
Apple is thought to have fixed the bug in iOS 13.4.5, but it’s still in beta. We may see the fix roll out quickly if enough Apple users start complaining publicly about crashing hardware. It’s a rather embarrassing bug for Apple, after all, but not the first time it’s happened. As MacRumors reported back in 2015, a string of characters sent to an iPhone in a text forced the phone to crash. iPhones were also crashing in 2016 after playing a three-second video.
