At around 9 this Tuesday night, I opened my iPhone to see a bizarre text message from my sister. Like, it looks like it makes NO sense.
I thought it was just my sister being a ~teen~ and I thought it was funny, so I sent it to my co-worker Alex. Then, the UNTHINKABLE happened.
Yes, I shut his phone off! I immediately tried it on my friend who was standing next to me...and the same thing happened. His phone shut off and restarted when I sent him the text.
It appears the text is a bug that crashes iMessage and reboots the iPhone. And this isn't the first time something like this has happened before!
According to CBS News:
The message, revealed on Reddit late Tuesday, seems to exploit an inability of the app's preview feature to correctly render the characters, which are not the standard alphanumerics or emoticons one typically texts. After repeated attempts, the app crashes, leaving the user unable to send or receive texts as usual.
UPDATE! Apple told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday afternoon that it's aware of the bug.
"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," said an Apple spokesperson
This is basically what it looks like when you send the ~crazy buggy text~:
People on Twitter started to notice the magic of the text...and were less than pleased:
There's a special place in hell for the person who created the black magic text that shuts your phone off
when someone sends me the text that shuts off my phone
One more person sends that damn text to me and shuts my phone off, we boxing 😑😂
IF ONE MORE PERSON SENDS ME THAT TEXT AND MY PHONE SHUTS OFF IM GONNA FLIP OUT
Although at least one person thought of a good use for the bug:
if you're worried that bae's texting other girls, just send them the text that shuts their phone off every minute 😊😊 you're welcome
Gotta love technology!
