Beware: iPhone Users, Don’t open this emoji message, it will freeze your smartphone.

Beware, here’s another ‘message’ that can freeze your iPhone. And the troubling thing is that it can do this even without you opening the message. This means that the message can freeze your iPhone as soon as you receive it.
Yes, the moment you receive the emoji message on your iPhone — it will freeze.

The message, first reported by EverythingApplePro YouTube channel, consists of two emojis and characters. The ‘message-of-death’ includes three characters — a white flag emoji, a zero (0) and a rainbow emoji along with an invisible character called variation sector 16 or VS16. When a text with these characters is received, an iPhone becomes temporarily unusable, with the touchscreen and physical buttons not responding.

Also, the affected iPhones stay frozen for around 5 minutes before they shutdown completely and restart without any issues.

The bug affects iPhones running on iOS 10 and 10.1.1. While the attack does not work on the latest iOS version, 10.2, a similar vulnerability does affect the OS. In this, the same string of characters can freeze the smartphone when embedded within a contacts file, which can be shared via iCloud Drive to an iMessage contact. In this case, the message does not reportedly completely freezes the iPhone but slows down the Messages app.

The YouTube video also explains how one can send the text message to others without affecting his/her own iPhone. The trick is fairly easy but requires desktop and the iPhone both.

The emoji message bug is the latest in a series of strange text-message vulnerabilities that have affected iPhones in past some months. Recently, we saw another text message that had the potential to crash Apple iPhones, but here users needed to interact with the text message to make it happen.

Watch the video here