A new bug that can easily crash iPhones is making the rounds online. The bug involves the playback of a video, with Apple’s phones crashing soon after the video finishes playing. Luckily, the device can simply be rebooted and it works again.
Apple’s iPhones have a long history of weird bugs that cause the device to crash, sometimes dramatically so. Last year a simple text message could disable almost all iPhones, without the user even having to read the message. Then, earlier this year, a simple link that was being passed around caused iPhones left and right to lockup and reboot themselves. Now, a video, is having quite similar results.
The video in question, which we won’t link to, comes from the Chinese video-sharing site, Miaopai. The video plays normally on iPhones, without any sign that anything is wrong. After the video finishes, however, it can take somewhere between a few seconds up to a few minutes, until the device crashes.
This trick seems to work on all versions of iOS starting with iOS 5. The only way to recover the phone is to force reboot it. On most iPhones you can do this by holding down the Home and Power buttons simultaneously. On iPhone 7 models, you need to hit the Power and Volume buttons.
The good news here is that this isn’t malware or some fatal virus that’s infecting devices and making them go haywire. Instead, the problem seems to be related to the way iOS handles media, leaving the device with some unfinished background tasks.
Apple hasn’t publicly commented on this issue and there doesn’t seem to be any workaround as of yet. Of course, you could just not watch the video if you want to continue using your phone.
Source: The Guardian