iPhone text crash bug also works via Snapchat text chats and Twitter DMs or mentions
iPhone text crash bug hits Twitter and Snapchat — Unfixed iOS bug allows booby-trapped messages to break Snapchat text chat and can be sent via Twitter direct messages or mentions
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after researchers surfaced the specific text string that crashes Messages and reboots iPhones via iMessage or SMS, the same payload has been shown to travel through third-party surfaces: Snapchat text chats and Twitter direct messages or mentions. Apple shipped a temporary mitigation the same day (releasing a temporary fix while promising a full update).
What makes this escalation notable is that it is not a one-off: the corpus shows the same class of bug resurfacing five years later with a Sindhi-language string that crashes iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Watch through notifications, suggesting text-parsing crashes are a recurring weakness in how iOS renders received strings, not a single bad codepath.
First-order effects
- Snapchat users are exposed through ordinary text chats and Twitter users through DMs or public mentions — both apps now deliver a payload that can crash and reboot an iPhone without any action from the recipient.
- Apple's temporary fix becomes urgent for heavy users of these apps, since blocking the sender inside Messages does nothing against a mention arriving in a Twitter notification.
Second-order effects
- Twitter and Snapchat face pressure to sanitize or filter incoming text client-side rather than wait on Apple's patch cycle, because their notification and chat surfaces turn any OS rendering flaw into a denial-of-service vector against their own users.
- Apple's promised full update carries reputational weight beyond Messages: every new delivery surface found widens the gap between the bug's reach and the pace of a permanent fix.
Third-order effects
- With the pattern repeating across 2015's string, the 2018 malicious-link crash Apple pledged to fix, and the 2020 Sindhi-string incident, text and notification rendering looks like a standing attack surface — pushing toward app-layer input sanitization as default practice rather than relying solely on OS vendors to patch each variant.
The trend: Text-rendering crash bugs keep reappearing across iOS versions and ever more delivery surfaces, making defensive filtering of received strings a permanent requirement for messaging platforms.