Don’t Set Your iPhone’s Date To January 1, 1970

According to CNN, the reason behind the crash remains a mystery, but by the way, why would anyone want to set an iPhone’s clock back 46 years?

Your iPhone really hates the date January 1, 1970.

But we can make a pretty educated guess. Attackers can set send malicious NTP requests to adjust every iPhone’s time settings to January 1, 1970, hence brick every iPhone connected to the same network. That’s right, it seems that if you go into any 64-bit iOS device and change the date to January 1, 1970, the device will not boot and only a physical fix will bring it back.

A report on Wired notes that the misleading image asking users to change their iPhones’ date appeared on 4Chan and once rendered useless, even iTunes can’t restore important data, leaving one with no choice but to buy a new device. If your time zone isn’t GMT, your iPhone might think you’re in a time before January 1, 1970 – or before zero. Though Unix time can be negative, possibility exist that something related to the time zones is crashing the iPhone. (Again, we’re not sure why they’re doing this, and we don’t recommend it).

Videos uploaded on YouTube show that the phone is not immediately affected by the change of date.

Meanwhile, just stay in the present.