A single Telugu character causing Apple devices to crash; fix coming soon

An iPhone is seen on display at a kiosk at an Apple reseller store in Mumbai, India, January 12, 2017. Picture taken January 12, 2017. REUTERS/Shailesh Andrade - RC15EA9AD010

Apple has finally confirmed that it is working on a fix which would eradicate the character bug which causes iOS, macOS and watchOS to crash.

The fix will arrive “ahead of their next scheduled major updates" which is iOS 11.3 (stable). Though Apple did not provide any timeframe, it can be expected that the fix will come sooner than later.

The bug, first reported by an Italian tech blog, Mobile World, is triggered by a Telugu character which if received or simply pasted in a text field can lead to a crash of multiple messaging and social media applications and at times the entire system.

The report says that if the character is displayed within an application like WhatsApp, Twitter or even iMessage, the app in question crashes each time one tries to restart it.

In case the character is received from someone else and it appears in the notification, the whole system can come crashing down as Springboard (the software which manages Home) resets. However, if you do not wait enough and try to force a reboot, the phone will go into a boot loop and would refuse to startup.

New iOS 11.2.5 bug: This Indian character will crash your iPhone and lock down the Messages app https://t.co/njdOVMbvJKpic.twitter.com/mP60RRdKPr

— Handility (@handility) February 15, 2018

Your only option will be to use the Device Firmware update (DFU) mode to restart the device and reinstalling the iOS.

There are chances that your data will be wiped from your phone. Fortunately, the upcoming version of the iOS 11.3 beta is already immune to the bug.