Texting in Arabic said to cause iPhones to crash
By Sarah Townsend
Arabian Business.com
iPhone users have discovered a mysterious bug that causes their phone to shut down when they text a particular string of Arabic text.
When the offending Arabic text is entered, the phone will crash and reboot within seconds.
The iMessage and Whatsapp applications reportedly also crash when another user tries to open the message containing the text. And, according to Forbes, the problem also occurs in Apple Mac computers.
Technology news website Silicon Republic reported that one user discovered the bug is the result of an error in how the iOS or Mac OS X operating systems interpret the coding.
As the software struggles to understand the sequence, it causes the iPhone to crash.
No details are available as to what the specific sequence of offending Arabic is. It is understood that the string of characters is random, rather than a complete sentence, and is therefore very difficult to replicate.
Apple has reportedly told customers it is working to resolve the issue, and said in a statement to Arabian Business: “We are aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update.”
Khaleej Times reported that in the meantime users can prevent the problem by using their phone settings to turn off message “previews”.