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There is a new glitch in iOS that causes pretty much any iOS device out there, be it an iPhone, an iPod, or an iPad, to freeze completely and require a reboot in order to return to a working state.
Discovered by EverythingApplePro, the issue comes down to a malicious link which, when loaded, makes iOS devices completely unusable. We’ve already tested this on our iPhones here at Softpedia, and we can confirm that the problem indeed exists, even on the iPhone 7 running iOS 10 beta 3.
The link connects to an MP4 video that is opened in Safari and which appears to be corrupted, causing what seems to be a memory leak, eventually taking full processing power and freezing the device. On the latest beta for iOS 10, the iPhone 7 seems to gradually slow down after opening the link, and the device is increasingly hot before ultimately displaying a spinning wheel and requiring a reboot.
The only way to deal with it is to hard reboot the iPhone by long-pressing the Power and the Home buttons on older iPhones or the Power and Volume Down buttons on the iPhone 7.
All iOS versions affected
For the moment, the exact causes of the glitch are not known, but EverythingApplePro claims that the same glitch exists in pretty much all iOS versions down to 5 and including the latest betas rolled out by Apple for iOS 10.
Most likely, Apple will patch the bug in the next update, but for the moment, just make sure that you’re not clicking the link should you receive it in your inbox.
The dangerous link is included in the box at the end of the article, but you should be very cautious, sending this to fellow iPhone owners could cause more than a simple freeze. We’ve reported the bug to Apple, and a patch is expected to be released in the coming weeks. iOS 10 beta users are likely to be the first to get it, probably as soon as this week.
UPDATE: It turns out that not all iPhones are affected. We've just tried to reproduce the bug on an iPhone 4 running iOS 7.1.2 and no crash occurs.
