WhatsApp’s billions of users are being warned about a new threat which can send their smartphones into total meltdown.
The simple ‘text bomb’ scam works by hiding a swathe of characters within a message.
Once opened these then expand causing the device to be overloaded and then crash.
The issue was first spotted on Reddit and although Express.co.uk has not tested the trick ourselves it seems there are plenty of YouTube videos confirming that it does work.
It seems the scam works on both Android and iOS devices although WhatsApp is yet to confirm any more details on who is affected and if they will issue a fix.
Luckily, it seems there won’t be any lasting damage to your device with things seemingly back to normal with a simple restart of your phone.
If WhatsApp has crashed your device just hit the off button, wait a few moments and switch things back on again.
This isn’t the first time that phones have been sent into a spin via a simple message.
Earlier this year Apple users were targeted by a text that contained an Indian language (Telugu) character.
Once received Apple’s iOS Springboard would crash and the phone would appear to reboot.
And back in 2015, a string of text was unearthed that could disable iMessage, while a year later, a five-second video was sent around by users to crash iPhones.
The news of this WhatsApp message prank comes as there could be some big changes coming to the platform.
The Facebook-owned app has so far remained an ad-free programme but that all looks set to change.
Earlier this week, speculation surrounding the chat app grew after WhatsApp founder Jan Koum left Facebook.
And now Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, David Marcus, has said WhatsApp will be more open to advertisers.
Speaking to CNBC, he said: "As far as advertising is concerned, we're definitely getting WhatsApp more open.
"We're now going to have the ability to enable larger companies, not only small businesses, to integrate a new API [application programming interface] to send and receive messages with people on the WhatsApp platform.”
The simple ‘text bomb’ scam works by hiding a swathe of characters within a message.
Once opened these then expand causing the device to be overloaded and then crash.
The issue was first spotted on Reddit and although Express.co.uk has not tested the trick ourselves it seems there are plenty of YouTube videos confirming that it does work.
It seems the scam works on both Android and iOS devices although WhatsApp is yet to confirm any more details on who is affected and if they will issue a fix.
Luckily, it seems there won’t be any lasting damage to your device with things seemingly back to normal with a simple restart of your phone.
If WhatsApp has crashed your device just hit the off button, wait a few moments and switch things back on again.
This isn’t the first time that phones have been sent into a spin via a simple message.
Earlier this year Apple users were targeted by a text that contained an Indian language (Telugu) character.
Once received Apple’s iOS Springboard would crash and the phone would appear to reboot.
And back in 2015, a string of text was unearthed that could disable iMessage, while a year later, a five-second video was sent around by users to crash iPhones.
The news of this WhatsApp message prank comes as there could be some big changes coming to the platform.
The Facebook-owned app has so far remained an ad-free programme but that all looks set to change.
Earlier this week, speculation surrounding the chat app grew after WhatsApp founder Jan Koum left Facebook.
And now Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, David Marcus, has said WhatsApp will be more open to advertisers.
Speaking to CNBC, he said: "As far as advertising is concerned, we're definitely getting WhatsApp more open.
"We're now going to have the ability to enable larger companies, not only small businesses, to integrate a new API [application programming interface] to send and receive messages with people on the WhatsApp platform.”
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