What could be worse than going about your usual day, with the usual smartphone web surfing, Instagraming, and text messaging, when suddenly your device crashes? Surely it was something you looked up on the internet, or perhaps that app that keeps closing itself whenever it feels like. Nope, it was a text message. If you're an iPhone user, there's a chance might end up having this bad luck happen to you. Thanks to a new bug found in Apple's iOS, a certain string of text characters could cause an instantaneous iPhone crash.

The unnamed bug came out in the open this week after several Reddit users posted about a mysterious glitch in the device's software. When the text message is received, the iPhone instantly crashes, causing a sudden reboot. The text contains Arabic characters, and is seen as a notification banner while your iPhone is locked, not while you are viewing it in the app where you can also see your message history. The message doesn't seem to effect the iPhone in the same way when received during a normal string of iMessage conversation.

Interesting the way the bug works. According to Cnet, it's not so much the Arabic characters themselves, but the way the iPhone tries to handle the string of characters, as it uses too many resources to display that notification banner when your smartphone is locked. Bugs in the iOS software are nothing new, and luckily this one is not going to affect a huge amount of iPhone users. Because of the specificity of the text string, however, it has already been pretty much confirmed that this a hacker/prank situation, not by accident. Updated information rolled in on Thursday confirming the same bug has also been affecting the Apple Watch, iPads, and Macs. Since Apple understands the problem, it is already working on a fix.