Apple said on Thursday a bug in some versions of iOS is causing its devices to crash when a single character in Telugu, an Indian language, is sent to the device or typed in text editor. The company was working on a fix for the iOS 11, the macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4 and tvOS 11 versions that the bug affects, an Apple spokesperson said. The company said older versions were not affected by the bug and added that Apple had already fixed the issue in the current beta versions of the operating systems.
Devices running on iOS 11 are affected and crash when any application receives the character, tech news website The Verge reported. Apps become unresponsive, including Apple’s iMessage and third-party applications like WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook messenger, the news report said. However, some apps like Telegram and Skype seem to be unaffected, the report said, adding that an Italian blog Mobile World spotted the bug.
Soon after the iOS crash incidents began surfacing on the Internet, some online trolls sought to prank with people by inserting the Telugu character in social media apps to crash the recipient’s iOS device. According to The Verge, the miscreants added the Telugu Unicode character into their Twitter handles, in addition to sending Direct Messages containing one. The users who are being targetted are reportedly seeing their iOS device crashing and rebooting. Some witty users have already discovered a workaround to prevent themselves from the trolls by accessing the social media websites including Twitter separately in a browser and then blocking the accounts that are responsible for the nuisance.
