'Viral' Text Message Crashes iPhones--and iPad, Mac, Apple Watch

A new text message is going “viral”–in a bad way. The character string, composed of a mix of English, Arabic and other characters, causes Apple iPhones to crash.

Consumers also complain that the text message is causing other Apple devices–including iPads and Macs–to crash, too. At the UK Guardian, a user demonstrated how the text message disrupted a top-of-the-line Apple Watch.

Apple is promising to fix the bug, which was apparently first reported on Reddit–and an army of journalists, programmers, and amateur sleuths is also on the case.

At Popular Mechanics, Eric Limer comments that “the heart of the problem could be some sort of weird invisible line break that Core Text reads wrong and just can’t handle.”