An obscure text string is crashing iPhones that run iOS 13

Have you even typed a random string of characters and letters to see if you can crash your phone? Neither have we. Apparently, a text string made up of random Sindhi characters and the Italian flag will now crash any iOS device running the latest iOS 13.4.1 software. 

The weird part is that you don’t have to type the string in a first-party iOS app, and either a notification or message in a third-party app can trigger the bug. If you own an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you better keep an eye out for this bug. Luckily it won’t brick your pretty Apple device, just cause it to crash after which you can easily start it up again.

and found that “[Y]ou can forcibly reboot an iPhone to get it back into a working state, or simply wait around a minute for the iOS Springboard to recover.”

According to 9To5Mac, the text includes characters written in the Sindhi language combined with the emoji for the Italian flag. For some reason, the text is causing Apple’s hardware to either crash or stop responding to input if they receive a notification containing the sequence. 

It looks like Apple jumped on this issue quickly and managed to fix the bug in software version 13.4.5, but it’s still in beta. Which means it’s not available to update yet. Once that’s available, the fix should be implemented and the bug squashed.