Crashing iPhones with 'Text Bomb'

Apple, the Cupertino-based tech giant with it's usual habit of staying in the limelight has again made it back in the news and this time it's not for good this time. Apple Inc. saw a shocking end to 2017 with the news of Apple deliberately slowing down old iPhones hitting the nerves of most iPhone users around the world. Now Apple is facing another major bug which has the potential to harm iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch and Macs spread around the world.

The bug was first reported by the Italian Blog Mobile World. The bug affects the Apple apps runing on the latest version of iOS 11.2.5 and macOS. According to reports, the effects of this bug range from random system crashes to lost of access to some applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, iMessage and Gmail. In the worst case the bug can also initiate a bootloop.

So, what is this bug?

The bug is introduced into an Apple device when someone sends a special unicode character from the Telugu language (an Indian language) in a text message using some text messaging apps or social media applications. The bug than wreaks havoc onto the device as the device starts showing wierd behavior with random system crashes, loss of access to apps and bootloops in the worst case as soon as the Telugu character shows up on the screen hence, the name 'TEXT BOMB'.

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It is not the first time that an Apple created OS is not able to handle Unicode characters, urls and videos properly. As was the case in January when an iOS glitch was discovered using which any person could crash an iPhone by just sending a specific url to that device via any text messaging app. While in 2015, another major fiasco became famous overnight - Unicode of Death. This was a bug that could overload an iPhone's memory by sending some special Arabic characters.

Just like the Unicode of Death case, the Telugu Text Bomb also causes a malfunction in the CoreText library, which is a library that consists of procedures that helps apps to display text on screens. The malfunction then causes the CoreText to access invalid memory and forces the system to crash.

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Apple has acknowledged the issue and is currently working on solving the Telugu Text Bomb bug. Apple says that the bug only affects iOS 11.2.5 so the next update to iOS 11.3 will fix it. The iOS 11.3 update is not expected to be rolled out that soon so users who wish to fix the issue for now can install the iOS 11.3 beta.