You know it’s not a great sign when an iPhone bug is affectionately named ‘the black dot of death’. Which is exactly what this virus putting a swift and silent end to your iMessages has been called.
As much as the name really makes me want to pack this article with pirate puns, it’s actually a little deadly to your beloved iPhone or iPad.
According to The Sun, this harmless looking, emoji-punctuated black dot bad boy hits your iMessage inbox enticing you to open it. If you do, it will freeze or blackout your phone.
How does it work? It’s packed with thousands of tiny unicode text pieces that you can’t see. It fills up your phone and boom, overload.
Once you open it, there’s no simple oh-i’ll-just-delete-the-message-and-all-will-be-well. Oh no. Once opened, the virus crashes your iMessage and subsequently causes your screen to freeze up or go black, and it could very well stay that way until Apple works out how to solve the issue.
Sounds a bit shit, yes?
Surely the old on-off trick will work, I hear you cry? Apparently not. The message is quite tricky to delete so it just re-loads and crashes your phone all over again.
Don’t abandon all hope just yet though. For those of us not still rocking the more…classic…iPhone models, there may be a glimmer of hope by way of forcing the iMessage app to close.
- Use 3D Touch to press and hold the iMessage icon, then hit ‘New Message’.
- Cancel the message. This will let you back into your iMessage conversation list.
- Hit ‘Edit’ to delete the evil black dot that has caused so much pain and devastation to your virtual social life.
If that doesn’t work you can try begging dear Siri to start a new conversation for you, which will hopefully also take you to your iMessage list to follow the same steps.
If neither of these work, or your iPhone model is old enough that Grandma could almost use it, you’re basically shit out of luck.
