Apple iOS bug alert: This 'text bomb' can crash your iPhone, iPad

Multiple iPhone and iPad owners around the world are complaining that a text message is causing their device's screen to freeze and crash.

It has come to light the miscreants posted a string of Sindhi language (predominantly used in Pakistan and some parts of India) characters on the Telegram messenger app and people opened the inbox, the iPhone ( &iPads) seem to have trouble recognizing them and is crashing.

We have come to understand that it is a hard task for iPhone (or even Android mobiles) when dealing with an exotic language such as Sindhi; it takes a lot of processing power to compress the message for a preview and de-compress when reading the full text. In this case, the iPhone fails to decompress and extract the message in its full form from the memory and thus causing it to freeze and crash.

Now, pranksters got to know of the bug and started sharing on them on other messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessage (exclusive to iPhones/iPads), and even social media channels as well. This apparently caused Apple devices to crash in wider regions across the world.

Also, this issue is seen only in the iPhones and iPads with the latest software iOS 13.4.1/iPadOS 13.4.1.

It can be noted that this is not the first time, we are seeing such text bombs crashing iPhones and iPads. Between 2015 and 2019, there were several instances wherein a string of Telugu, Arabic, Marathi, Chinese and other Unicode texts sent to iMessage caused the devices to crash.

Is there is a solution to this text bomb bug?
As per recent reports, Apple is already working on it and the bug-fix is expected to be available in the soon-to-be-released iOS/iPadOS 13.4.2.

For now, if the device's screen is freezing, just reboot the device by long-pressing volume up/down simultaneously with the power button.

Also, until the new update comes, it is better to turn off the notifications on messaging and social media apps.

Go to Settings >> go to individuals Apps >> turn off notifications.

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