May 7, 2018 05:24 EDT
There are a myriad of messaging clients available on smartphones these days, including the more popular Facebook Messenger as well others such as
Telegram which has found itself blocked from use in Russia. While these services do offer expanded capabilities compared to good old SMS which has been a staple capability of mobile phones for decades, that hasn't meant that they have been infallible as far as bugs are concerned. For instance, back in February, it was found that receiving a message with a single character from the Indian Telugu alphabet
would crash multiple apps on iOS, including WhatsApp, as well as the iOS Springboard.
Now,
according to a claim on Reddit, another bug has been found in WhatsApp that will cause the app to lock up, crash back to the launcher, or take down the whole mobile operating system. If a specially crafted message, found on Pastebin, is sent to a device, it can manifest in the aforementioned behavior, thanks to tens of thousands of invisible "left-to-right" and "right-to-left" control characters placed between the emoji and the final quotation marks.
