Calling all iPhone users: you can breathe a sigh of relief.
Thursday night, Apple published a temporary fix to a strange bug that causes a user’s messaging app to unexpectedly quit after receiving a “specific series of unicode characters,” that appear to be a combination of symbols and arabic-language characters. If this happens to you, just follow these simple steps. (Yes, you’ll have to get Siri involved):
- Ask Siri to “read unread messages.”
- Use Siri to reply to the malicious message. After you reply, you’ll be able to open Messages again.
- In Messages, swipe left to delete the entire thread. Or tap and hold the malicious message, tap More, and delete the message from the thread.
Apple plans to permanently fix the bug in an upcoming software update.