There’s a new bug that is recently rendering iPhones to freeze, slow down, and crash. It is a harmless-looking message with a black dot emoji a.k.a. “the black dot of death”. This bug affects all iPhones running the most recent version of iOS, iOS 11.3 and the iOS 11.4 betas. There’s no verification yet though whether it also affects older iOS.
What Actually Happens
When a message is received containing the said emoji and eventually opened by the user, the messaging app will crash and the device locked into a white screen. This is because these messages containing the black dot emoji are followed by hundreds of thousands of invisible characters which causes the Messages app to freeze. It will then flood the iPhones’ CPU where it will overheat and a possibility of a device crash.
What You Can Do
The black dot “text bomb” bug can easily be transmitted. Someone will just simply send a string of texts, wait for their target to open such message and that’s it!
When your iPhone suddenly freezes because of this so-called text bomb, try force-quitting ‘Messages’ and re-open it. After which, delete the conversation with the black dot immediately.
Make sure also to update to the latest iOS when it is released. Apple will surely fix this issue and create a patch for this annoying bug.
