iPhone text 'bomb' can crash iOS 13 with just a string of letters

A new Apple text "bomb" forces iPhones that receive it to crash. The innocent-looking message – which is made up of the Italian flag emoji and a Sindhi character – overloads the device and forces it to shut down. It works on Macs, Apple Watches and iPads as well as iPhones and there is hardly anything that can be done to stop the damage. The bug seems to exploit a problem in the message notifications on the phone, which means that it is unable to display the notification about the new message and crashes the app. While the problem will sometimes simply force the Messages app to crash and re-open, some users have reported that the problem can also force the iPhone itself to shut down.