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Apple Admits To Safari Problem Causing iPhones To Crash

This article is more than 8 years old.

There is a website link spreading across text messages and social media that is causing iPhones to crash. The website link -- which is CrashSafari.com -- literally causes the Apple web browser on iPhones to crash. And that leads to a reboot.

Here is what happened when I tried visiting the link on my iPhone:

What is causing the crash to happen? Global News said that the URL “overloads the browser with a complicated string of code, causing the browser to freeze and ultimately crash.” Essentially, CrashSafari.com sends a never-ending string of characters to the address bar of the browser and that causes major memory management issues. The iOS devices end up overheating when it tries to handle the code so it gives up and simply reboots the device within about 15-20 seconds.

CrashSafari.com also affects iPads and iPods running on the latest versions of iOS. And it also appears to crash Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and the Mac version of Apple Safari. When I tried the CrashSafari.com link on my Mac laptop, I ended up having to "Force Quit" the Safari browser because it froze and kept showing me the spinning beach ball wheel icon as the cursor. 

The CrashSafari.com website has actually been around for a year, but it became rampant this past week after going viral on social media. To quickly spread the hoax on social media, Internet pranksters are using URL shorteners like Bit.ly to hide the link while sending it to their contacts. Fortunately, CrashSafari.com does not contain any malware nor does it cause any severe problems.

Wired reported that CrashSafari.com was created by Matthew Bryant, a 22-year-old application security expert based out of San Francisco. “In my spare time I often test how browsers will handle odd code that gets thrown at them,” said Bryant via Wired. Bryant said he created the website as a joke after he discovered the browser vulnerabilities.

Last year, there was a similar problem where iPhone users could crash another person’s iPhone by simply sending a text message that contained a string of Arabic characters due to the way that iOS handled Unicode. And a bug identical to that same issue also plagued iOS 6 and Mac OS X 10.8 around August 2013.

According to iMore editor-in-chief Rene Ritchie, Apple is aware of the CrashSafari.com problem and is actively working on a fix. To avoid the CrashSafari.com problem, iMore is recommending iPhone users to long-press on a text link to see full URLs. But iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus users should not press hard enough to open the 3D Touch preview since that could also crash Safari if they received the CrashSafari.com link as a shortened URL. On Mac OS X, you can hover the mouse over a text link to see the full URL. But the most important thing to do is avoid clicking on any links that seem suspicious.

Have you received the CrashSafari.com link recently? What are your thoughts about the problem? Please leave a comment!