A Malicious Video Can Cause Your iPhone Or iPad To Freeze

MacWorld reports that a corrupt video link started making rounds this week. The display no longer responds, the home button stops working, and even the power button won’t have any effect on affected devices.

Overheating was cited as the biggest problem by iPhone users, while apps crashing and headphone problems where amongst the top other issues. The device will work normally once the handset is rebooted.

Apple iPhone bug: A new 5-second video MP4 file can cause your device to freeze and crash abruptly. A year ago a simple text message could disable nearly all iPhones, without the user even having to read the message. Apple faces continued problems with memory leaks in browsers.

Apple hasn’t publicly commented on this issue and there doesn’t seem to be any workaround as of yet.

You might want to avoid opening any videos on your iPhone for a while.

We’re not going to link to the actual video here for obvious reasons, but enough people have tested it to satisfy us it’s real. In most cases, the number are quite large and mostly include a multiple number of near spammy videos circulating on WhatsApp, Hike and chat boxes of other popular messaging apps.

Apple expert Everything Apple Pro has made a YouTube video detailing the new glitch.

It’s not apparently clear as to why this happens. When the corrupted video is played, iOS isn’t sure how to properly handle it.

Because of the nature of the flaw, it isn’t specific to a certain iOS build. We’ve just tried to reproduce the bug on an iPhone 4 running iOS 7.1.2 and no crash occurs.

The video takes advantage of a bug in iOS relating to the handling of media files, and it appears to affect both iPhones and iPads.

To hard reset and fix an iPhone 7, you need to press and hold the power and volume down button until the Apple logo appears and the phone reboots. As of now, it doesn’t seem like there’s any long-term side effects to playing the video back, but there’s no guarantee. It’s unclear at this stage whether Apple will be issuing a fix for the bug.