This Tweet Crashes Twitter on iPhones

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

I was hate-scrolling Twitter last night at 2 am or so, contemplating whether bleach was the answer to all our problems and why no one seems to care about Sam Porter Bridges’ labor issues.

Then the app suddenly crashed—and it just wouldn’t open up again.

I got mad, I think because I made an angry tweet I wanted to get some engagement on, but more likely because I had been mad all day. Anyway, that’s besides the point. The point is I couldn’t open the app at all.

Given that this week researchers warned against a potentially dangerous hack against iPhones, I got paranoid too. But after a few hours of sleep, I now realize that was a moment of bliss I should have cherished.

It turns out that a specific string of characters is crashing the Twitter app on the iPhone and also crashing some browsers. If you want, you can crash your Twitter app and experience the bliss I felt.

Of course, before you do any of this, please consider that this will very likely crash your Twitter app, and perhaps your whole iPhone. It is not super easy to get it working again. Deleting and re-installing the Twitter app doesn’t work, for example.

So, do this at your own risk!!!

Step 1: Open your Twitter app on your iPhone (sorry if you have Android)

Step 2: Check out this tweet.

Step 3: Retweet it.

Step 4: Wait for someone else to retweet it or like it, so that it gets into your mentions.

Step 5: Enjoy life without Twitter.

In case you’re wondering how this happened, it’s because of one of those seemingly dumb and recurring text or font bugs that Apple can’t seem to get rid of. Of course, not all bugs lead to more than an annoying crash, or a hack, so this is one of those you probably don’t need to worry too much about. Presumably, it will be fixed soon.

If you already are regretting this, do a hard reboot, and undo the retweet from a web browser on a desktop, just in case.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Twitter spokesperson said the company is “aware of this and looking into it.”

This story was updated to include Twitter’s comment.

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* This article was automatically syndicated and expanded from VICE: Motherboard.