Social media platforms went ballistic this week with reports from people that their iPhones would turn off after receiving a certain text. The message consists of two English words along with a bunch of characters, and it works when it's sent either from Android or Apple devices. No one has shown that it does any permanent damage. According to a report by CBC, users don’t have to open and read a message for it to shut down their device; even if the iPhone is in sleep mode it still shuts down. Today, Apple announced that the people there were working on a fix for the as-yet unnamed vulnerability. “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.”
Any phone affected by the message will automatically restart. To prevent being impacted by the bug, go to Settings and turn off message previews.
