New iOS bug crashes Messages app and reboots iPhones when a specific string of text is received via iMessage or SMS
New iOS Bug Crashing iPhones Simply by Receiving a Text Message [Includes Fix] — A new bug has been discovered in the Messages app, allowing a string of characters sent …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the first documented instance of a now-recurring failure mode on Apple platforms: a short string of characters, delivered through an ordinary channel, takes down the whole device. Within days the same payload was shown to work outside Messages too — crashing iPhones when received through Snapchat chats and Twitter DMs or mentions.
What makes the story worth tracking is its repetition rather than its novelty. Apple faced a near-identical Messages crash triggered by a malicious link in 2018, then a character string that locked users out of Messages, Messenger and WhatsApp, and again in 2020 a Sindhi-language string that crashed iPhone, iPad, Mac and Watch via notifications before being patched in an iOS 13.4.5 beta. Each episode shares the same anatomy: text handling in the system-level rendering path fails catastrophically on crafted input.
First-order effects
- Any iPhone user can be hit without doing anything wrong — receiving the string over iMessage or SMS crashes Messages and reboots the phone, and repeat messages keep it bricked-in-a-loop until the sender stops or a workaround is applied.
Second-order effects
- Because the payload works through any app that renders text into notifications, third-party services like Snapchat and Twitter inherit the outage for free, forcing their developers to filter input at the app layer while they wait on Apple's OS fix.
Third-order effects
- The 2015–2020 sequence suggests Apple treats these as point fixes rather than hardening the shared notification-rendering stack, so each new Unicode edge case becomes a fresh zero-effort denial-of-service vector against every iOS device at once.
The trend: Apple's centralized text-and-notification pipeline keeps converting single crafted strings into platform-wide crash bugs, with emergency iOS point releases as the recurring remedy.