What is the “black dot of death” bug on iPhones?

The Internet is awash with warnings about the so-called “black dot of death” which comes in the form of a SMS or iMessage on your iPhone that will completely crash your messaging app.

We discuss what the “black dot of death” actually is and how you should respond if you are unlucky enough to receive it.

Is the “black dot of death” real?

It’s real, and yes it really can crash your messaging app. But don’t listen to some media outlets or blogs that claim it can permanently damage, even destroy, your handset. Because it won’t.

Is it a virus?

No. It’s a bug that some pranksters are exploiting. Apple are expecting to fix the bug soon, meaning the bug will no longer work.

What does it effect?

The bug affects all recent iPhone handsets, including phones running iOS 11 and beta versions of 11.4. Similar versions are spreading on WhatsApp.

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How does the “black dot of death” work?

It’s similar to a recent bug on WhatsApp that caused an almost identical issue. Essentially the prankster sends an iMessage (actually it’s two messages) that contain thousands of invisible characters or instructions that cannot be seen on the actual message you receive. When the recipient opens the message, the messaging app opens and crashes.

Normally iPhones can handle such invisible characters, but because there are so many that have been sent in the message, the handset gets overloaded, and the app subsequently crashes. The user will notice they cannot leave the message thread as the messaging app has completely frozen. Force exiting the app and reloading it doesn’t solve the problem as it will still be frozen. Unlike the WhatsApp exploit that targeted Android users, even restarting the phone doesn’t solve the issue.

The messages feature a black dot icon in the message, hence the name of the bug. However it isn’t this icon that causes the crash, it’s the invisible characters sent along with it.

The bug is very much like a denial-of-service attack, as it causes your app to become so busy that it cannot process legitimate commands.

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How can I get my phone’s messaging app working again?

Don’t worry, your phone isn’t destroyed. This is just a nuisance bug and it’s quite easy to fix.

For most modern iPhone handsets, the user needs to first force exit the iMessage app, and then hold down on the Messaging app icon on the home screen (3D touch) and select new message from the resulting menu. This loads the (now responding) messaging app. Then click “cancel” to return to a list of your conversations where you can delete the offending message by swiping.

On older iPhones without 3D touch you need to open Siri instead and instruct her to send replies to whoever sent the infected message until the offending message is taken off the iMessage screen.

Like WhatsApp who had a similar bug exploited against their platform, Apple are expected to release a patch for this bug very soon.