A patch should arrive in the coming days

May 27, 2015 04:47 GMT  ·  By

It appears that there's a newly discovered bug in Apple's iOS mobile operating system related to the Messages app and the notification system used in iPhone and iPad devices.

According to a Reddit user, who has recently reported the issue, when someone receives a certain text message (see the example below), it will turn their phone off. The bug has been found to work on both iPhone and iPad devices.

The Messages app will start to crash continuously when the respective text message is received, which contains what at first sight appears to be a simple Arabic text, making the phone reboot or shut down.

"I just received this message in a group text and it actually turned my phone off. Send that to someone with an iPhone it turns their phone off," says Reddit user aus10_t8um on a recent thread.

Also, when searching Twitter with the string "iPhone turn off text," you will find a lot of people complaining about not being able to access the Messages app on their iPhone devices, as well as the line of text that turns off the device. We will keep you updated once we have more information.

Apple might fix the bug in the coming days

This is not the first time a bug like this is discovered in the Messages app, as there were several reports in the past, which could also affect Apple's OS X 10.8 and iOS 6 operating systems.

Apple should step up and release a patch for this nasty bug that affects the iOS 8 operating system as soon as possible, as it currently allows pranksters to crash someone's iPhone or iPad device with a simple text message. We will come back with details on this once we have more information on this matter.