A new iOS text bug has been discovered that causes iPhones to crash. The flaw involves several characters from the Sindhi language that cause iOS to lock up and an iPhone to crash. The character string has been circulating this week on Discord servers and Telegram, and The Verge has tested and confirmed that it will crash an iPhone running Apple’s latest iOS 13.4.1 release.
You can forcibly reboot an iPhone to get it back into a working state, or simply wait around a minute for the iOS Springboard to recover. The flaw appears to mainly affect the way iOS handles notifications in apps, and the best way to protect against people sowing mischief on the internet is to disable notifications from messaging apps. 9to5Mac reports that the latest 13.4.5 beta appears to fix the issue, so it’s clear Apple is aware of the problem.
It’s been a peaceful two years since the last iOS text bug caused iPhones to crash worldwide. The previous bug in iOS 11 even disabled access to apps and messages, and involved sending an Indian language (Telugu) character to devices.
Apple has struggled with weird iOS text bugs for many years. Back in 2018 a single link could freeze an iPhone, and a tiny string of text disabled iMessage in 2015. Even a 5-second video crashed iPhones a few years ago. Apple also experienced issues with an iOS 11 bug in 2017 that crashed iPhones, and the company took the unusual step of issuing a significant iOS update just hours after the bug started occurring.
