Apple customers might want to be extra cautious about using public hotspots for a while, because connecting to a network with a specific identifier can reportedly break an iPhone’s Wi-Fi.
Secret Club founder Carl Schou said connecting to his personal network with the SSID in question—”%p%s%s%s%s%n”—”permanently disabled” his iPhone’s Wi-Fi. He also shared a video showing his device automatically disabling Wi-Fi every time he attempted to re-enable it in the Settings app.
Schou reported that “neither rebooting nor changing SSID” solved the problem, and numerous people responded to his tweet to confirm the issue. But there is some good news: The bug isn’t actually permanent. It can be fixed by resetting the affected iPhone’s network settings by following these steps:
- Open the Settings app
- Go to General > Reset > Reset Network Settings
- Enter your passcode
- Reconfigure your network settings after your iPhone has restarted
That results in a bit of hassle, especially if you regularly connect to many Wi-Fi networks, but it’s better than not being able to access those networks at all. The biggest problem is that many people might not know they can reset their iPhone’s network settings, so they might panic if they encounter this bug.
The underlying issue appears to be a flaw with the parser iOS uses to interpret user input. Twitter user “pwnaday” said this problem doesn’t occur when an iPhone connects to a Bluetooth device, however, so perhaps Apple could extend similar protections to Wi-Fi networking to prevent this bug from occurring.
