A new iPhone-crashing bug is making rounds, messing up any iPhone, iPad or iPod that plays a specific five-second video.
After playing the video in question, the iPhone's display becomes unresponsive, the home button stops working, the power button does nothing - basically the entire device freezes up.
The five-second video is believed to have some sort of memory leak that causes iPhones to crash, and it seems that the only option to make the device usable again is to perform a reboot.
Reddit users were the first to report on the issue, drawing attention that the corrupted video will create a loop and crash any iPhone soon after opening the link.
How The iPhone-Crashing Video Bug Works
It seems the corrupted video does no damage if it's transferred as a file, but it will crash the iPhone if it's sent as a link that prompts iOS 10 to play the video in its default player. Opening a link with this video will cause the iPhone to crash in as little as 10 seconds after playing the file.
To recover from this freeze and make your iPhone usable again, hold down the home button and power button at the same time to perform a hard reset. After the reboot, the iPhone will get back to normal.
The bug seems to affect all iPhones, not just a particular model. The Verge reports testing the video on a number of iPhones running iOS 10.1 and beta versions of iOS 10.2, getting the same result with each device. All smartphones froze shortly after playing the corrupted video.
Beware Of Pranksters
As always, such crashing bugs may be used to intentionally mess with someone's device, so beware of any shady video links you receive from pranksters with a twisted idea of fun.
This isn't the first time that a bug crashed iPhones and spread like wildfire before being shut down. A text message bug wreaked havoc across the Apple ecosystem back in 2015, while a Safari crash code earlier this year crashed the browser on Macs and caused iPhones and iPads to reboot.
Apple has yet to comment on the matter or provide a fix, but the company should offer at least a temporary workaround soon enough. The company could address this in a minor update.
In the meantime, it might be wise to steer clear of any suspicious links and MP4 files that might come your way. For obvious reasons, we will not be linking the iPhone-crashing video in question.
