Apple iPhone Users Beware Of ‘Prank’ Video

Another irritating bug in Apple’s iOS operating system has been uncovered by pranksters who use a seemingly innocent video to crash iPhones.

If the .mp4 video is played in the iPhone’s video player, it will cause the iPhone to slow to a crawl and eventually freeze altogether, forcing a hard reset.

Memory Related?

The video in question is said to be from the Sina Weibo-backed video-sharing app Miaopai. It seems to be spread via iMessage and other messaging services and affects all versions of iOS, going back to at least iOS 5.

Once the video is played, it takes about 20 seconds before the iPhone slows down and eventually completes freezes. Even if the video is closed before it finishes, it does not stop the bug.

A video from EverythingApplePro shows the ‘prank’ video crashing an iPhone.

The ‘prank’ video itself is just three seconds long and there is speculation that the video itself is corrupted and interferes with the iPhone’s memory.

A hard reboot is required to unfreeze the iPhone and there doesn’t seem to be any other side affects, and phones operate normally once rebooted.

Text Bug

Of course this is not the first that Apple’s iOS has been impacted by a bug that crashes devices. In May 2015 an iOS bug made Apple devices reboot just by receiving a simple text message.

When any iPhone received the text, it instantly crashed and rebooted, as long as the recipient was not viewing their message history at the time.

That bug was apparently caused by a glitch in the way iOS rendered Arabic text.

And then in January this year a prank site called ‘crashsafari.com’ caused Apple’s Safari browser to stop working.

The website also affected Chrome and Firefox browsers.

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