Apple Works To Fix Telegu Character Bug That Crashes iPhones

Tom Jowitt,

Not again. Fix on the way to stop iPhones crashing due to an Indian language Telegu character

Apple is working urgently to fix an embarrassing glitch with its latest software update that is causing iPhones to crash.

The problem occurs in Apple devices when a single character in Telugu, an Indian language, is sent to the device or typed in text editor.

It should be remembered that this is not the first time that Apple devices have proved to be vulnerable to text bombs or indeed just simple characters.

Character Crash

Apple has said it is working on a fix for the iOS 11, the macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4 and tvOS 11 operating systems affected by the bug.

Older Apple OSs are apparently not affected by the bug.

According to the Verge, devices running on iOS 11 are affected and crash when any application receives the character.

Apps become unresponsive, including Apple’s iMessage and third-party applications such as WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook messenger.

But other apps such as Telegram and Skype are apparently unaffected.

Italian blog Mobile World apparently first spotted the bug.

The discovery of the flaw will add to the pressure on Apple, after its security reputation has taken a hit from repeated security problems and scares of late.

Apple Vulnerabilities

And this is not the first time that Apple devices have found to be vulnerable to characters or even text bombs.

Last month for example it was discovered that a humble iMessage could cause an iPhone or indeed an Apple Mac to crash. The malicious code of that ‘text bomb’ had been uploaded to a webpage on GitHub, but was subsequently taken down.

And in 2015 Apple Macs and iPhones were found to be crashing because of a simple string of Arabic characters.

Later that same year Apple was forced to issue a fix for the ‘effective power’ iMessage flaw that caused iDevices to crash when certain text was sent to an unsuspecting user.

In January 2017 another prank text was found to crash iPhones. This flaw involved the use of a white flag emoji, a zero, a rainbow emoji and a hidden character called a ‘variation selector’.

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