Apple iPhones around the world are being hit by small "text bomb" messages that freeze and eventually crash the device.

The bug, which first appeared earlier this week on Discord and Telegram groups (via The Verge), can cause this problem even if the message just pops up in notifications. running the latest live version of iOS (iOS 13.4.1) iPhone, you can see how this bug occurs in the following tweet from YouTuber EverythingApplePro.

The original version of this text bomb used an Italian flag emoji as part of the message, but this is not actually necessary for the bomb to work.

I am certainly no coding expert, but this is a surface level explanation as to why this message is such a pesky customer.

It seems to stem from the use of Sindhi characters in the text. Sindhi is a language spoken in Pakistan and India and can be written in several scripts, including Perso-Arabic and Devanagari (Hindi). This particular bug seems to be related to the Perso-Arabic script.

A feature of Arabic-based writing systems is the ability to enter other characters by overlaying small character elements (called diacritics) above and below the main characters in a sentence.

The fact that this message will appear in the notification means that iOS will use the ellipsis ("...") ), which means that the message needs to be shortened by.

Omitting this large number of different characters means that some characters will unexpectedly change position or size, resulting in your phone mishandling them and trying to access non-existent parts of your device's memory, eventually causing malfunctions like freezes or crashes. causing malfunctions such as.

This explanation is based on similar text bombs in the past that used Arabic characters, such as the 2015 "Effective Power" bug.

While it is alarming to see a phone suddenly freeze or turn off on its own, it does not actually cause any damage to the phone. After a crash, the iPhone will reset itself immediately. This is a waste of time and annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, the consequences are fairly mild.

If your iPhone will not reset on its own, you can force it to do so by pressing the volume up button, then the volume down button, then the side button until the Apple logo appears.

The likelihood of encountering this bug is quite low. More likely is that your mischievous friend will try to send you this message.

To work around this issue, go to Settings > Notifications, turn off notifications for messaging apps, select the app in question, and set the "Allow Notifications" slider at the top to Off.

Apple seems to be working on this issue, as the latest beta version of iOS 13.4.5 does not seem to have this bug (via 9to5Mac). Hopefully it will come out with a rushed update in the next few days that resolves the issue and allows you to safely turn your notifications back on after you download it.