There’s an iOS bug, and this is how it affects your iPhone

Bad news for iPhone users: There’s a new iOS bug out there, and it’s pretty frustrating. The bug, which has been discovered in iOS 11, crashes your iPhone and blocks access to apps such as iMessages. This happens if you send a specific Indian language character. Italian blog Mobile World found it, and The Verge then tested it on multiple iPhones running iOS 11.2.5. It even happens on the macOS versions of Safari and iMessages. Yikes.

The bug is triggered when by a character from the Indian language Telugu. Once the message has been sent and received, Apple’s iOS Springboard will crash. As the iMessages app tries and fails to load the character, the app will no longer open. The only way to get access is to have another friend send you a message so you can try to open the app and delete the thread that contained the character.

This means you can lose access to your texts — and even lose entire conversations.

According to The Verge, this also happens with third-party apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Outlook for iOS. It seems like Apple became aware of the bug about three days ago, and they plan to fix it in an iOS update, iOS 11.3 release, coming in early spring.

This is the latest in a string of annoying iOS bugs. Last month, there was a link that could freeze an iPhone. In December, there was an iOS 11 bug that crashed iPhones, which caused Apple to issue a significant iOS update just hours after the bug happened — something they normally don’t do so quickly.

We hope this one gets fixed ASAP because no one wants to lose access to their messages.