PSA: Update iOS now to protect yourself from the Telugu Bug

If you’re particularly active on Twitter, Whatsapp or iMessage, you’ll probably have heard about the Telugu Unicode bug. These are two Telugu characters that cause iOS 11.2.5 and Mac apps to crash. This affects iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches, and apparently simply trying to avoid typing the characters isn’t enough. All it takes is an @reply or for those characters to be in someone’s twitter handle when they like your tweets, and your apps will crash.

This becomes particularly troublesome on mobile because the characters will continue to appear in your notifications even after you restart the app. In many cases, you’ll have to put your phone in device firmware upgrade (DFU) mode to fix things, but Apple’s latest iOS 11.2.6 release specifically fixes this issue, while also fixing a memory corruption issue among others.

Meanwhile, a detailed blog post by Mozilla engineer Manish Goregaokar deep dives into the entire issue. He finds that there are a few other combinations of characters that seem to cause crashes when suffix-joining consonants are applied. However, the crash seems to be specific to certain combinations of letters, and not just clusters in general.

Manish hasn’t been able to come with a definite conclusion as to what exactly causes the crashes yet, so hopefully Apple’s engineers have covered enough bases with their latest update. Updates for macOS have also been released, so these are some updates that you'll want to get onto.

Sources: Tech Crunch, Tech Radar, Manish Goregaokar blog, 9 to 5 Mac

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.