Have you heard about the plague of text messages? If you’re an owner of an Apple product, you may want to keep your eyes open for this “Reboot Text” that’s causing iPhones to crash. What may seem like a frustrating and irritating prank to play on friends isn’t really just that. This mysterious message is really a string of symbols that manipulates a bug in the iOS system. The user receives the message and it causes the phone to continuously crash and reboot.
And the iPhone isn’t the only product being effected. Reports from The Guardian state that this bug is also triggering on the Apple Watch, iPad, and Macs.
The bug has been reported to Apple and they’ve come forth with a statement. “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.”
So far, there is no official fix to save your precious Apple products yet, but there is one coming and ways to protect yourself from it happening to you.
– Try having the buggy message sent one more time. This is said to cancel out the effect.
– Turn off the “View in lock screen” option for text messages in your settings.
– Send a message to yourself via Siri, or a Mac. Macs are much less likely to be affected.
It has not yet been reported how long the fix will take to come but it is assumed to be resolved within the next iOS update.