An Indian character is causing Apple devices to crash

MANILA, Philippines – Trolls were quick to exploit the insta-crash iOS bug, first reported by Italian blog Mobile World, adding the character in their Twitter names and spreading the “killer message” to timelines around the world.

According to Mashable, when the Indian Telugu character in question is opened on an iPhone running on 11.2.5, apps including the native Messages, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter will crash and even sometimes revert back to the login screen, prompting users to enter their PIN again.

Telugu is a language that comes from south India, spoken by around 80 million people worldwide. 

It was later discovered that the bug also plagued other Apple devices running on current versions of its operating system: iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4, and tvOS 11.

This bug is problematic because the only way to currently fix it is by deleting the entire messaging thread on other devices unaffected by it. It becomes even more troublesome on Twitter since users do not even need to intentionally view a name or a Tweet with the character to trigger the crash; the moment it’s in a user’s feed, it could do some damage.

Most of the current trolling is found primarily on Twitter so it is advised to immediately block anyone trying to spread a tweet or a user handle with the character, using a different device.

As with similar cases before, Apple has acknowledged the issue and is readying a fix that should be rolling out before the 11.3 update. The bug has already been resolved in the beta of the latest iOS operating systems so users experiencing this should expect it to be fixed very soon. – Rappler.com