A string of text with Sindhi characters is crashing iOS devices worldwide

iOS, much like any operating system, is host to a slew of bugs. Some of them are minor and do little in the way of lasting harm, while others are potentially dangerous and can lead to data breaches or worse. A Twitter user stumbled upon an interesting (and quite annoying) bug in iOS 13.4.1.

EverythingApplePro discovered that a text containing some characters (not displayed here for obvious reasons) in the Sindhi language triggered iOS to go haywire and crash altogether. It renders the device unresponsive, and the only way to fix it is to restart the phone. The character strings in question have gone viral and are being used by pranksters to prey on unsuspecting users. This particular character-driven bug also occurred in 2018, but with a character in Telugu (an Indian language) instead.

It appears that iOS 13.4.5 fixes the issue. However, the software is still in beta and will not be available to most users for quite some time. In the meanwhile, the only possible fix is to switch off notifications for all messaging apps. Now that the string of text is widely available on most instant messaging platforms, the likelihood of you receiving it is higher than ever.

A Reddit user has pieced together something reminiscent to a fix, but it is for jailbroken devices only. Apple's methods to deal with text-based exploits haven't been working well at all. Every time one exploit is fixed, another one pops up after a year or two, much to the annoyance of Apple users. It is rather intriguing as to why iOS is susceptible to this particular type of bug, as Android doesn't seem to have any such trouble at all.