A Newly Discovered iOS Bug Can Crash Your iPhone

As first noted by Italian blog Mobile World, the bug occurs when a particular character from the Indian language (Telugu) is sent to a user. As The Verge explains, the virus can cause problems on iOS devices using iOS 11.2.5 and on macOS versions of Safari and Messages.

The bug itself involves sending an Indian language (Telugu) character to devices, and Apple’s iOS Springboard will crash once the message has been received. Messages will no longer open as the app is trying and failing to load the character, and it appears that the only way to regain access to your iMessages is to have another friend send you a message and try to delete the thread that contained the bad character.

They continue:

We’ve also tested the bug on third-party apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Outlook for iOS and found that these apps can become disabled once a message is received. It might be difficult to fix and delete the problem message for apps like WhatsApp, unless you have web access enabled. Telegram and Skype appear to be unaffected.

Thankfully, Apple squashed this bug in the first iOS 11.3 beta. Unfortunately, the first public version of iOS 11.3 isn’t expected to launch until the spring. Whether Apple will push out a bug fix earlier than this isn’t yet known.

Apple has seen the number of iOS bugs grow significantly in recent months. Because of this, the company plans on making security improvements a central part of “iOS 12,” which should be announced in June.