A strange text bug is causing iPhones and other iOS devices to crash when they receive a particular notification. This news was first reported by MacRumors.
Users on Twitter were quick to identify the culprit character string, which consists of the Italian flag symbol and characters from the Sindhi language, which is spoken primarily in Pakistan and India.
because of this symbol
— ضيف الله (@i_Deef) April 24, 2020
There have been reports of this character string being shared via Twitter, Telegram, and other messaging apps. If the string appears in a notification on a user’s iPhone or other iOS device, it will cause it to crash in some cases, or stop responding to touch input in other cases. If this happens, users can easily fix the problem by rebooting the device, so it’s more of an annoyance than anything else.
Apple has had issues with similar text bugs in the past. In 2018, a more serious bug caused a continuous reboot loop when iOS devices received a message containing a character from the Telugu language. And in 2017, a combination of three emoticons was discovered to be capable of crashing and freezing certain models of iPhones and iPads.
If you want to ensure that this new text bug does not affect your device, the simplest solution is to disable notifications from messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, or Twitter. Stopping these apps from displaying notifications or disabling notifications altogether will prevent the crashing issue.
According to MacRumors, the bug has been fixed on the second beta version of iOS, 13.4.5., but this version is not yet available to all iOS users.
