There’s a new video floating around the World Wide Web. No, it’s not a cat video or someone doing a motorcycle trick. It’s actually a 3-second video with cheery music in the background. Sure, if you play it back, you may not think anything could go wrong, but be forwarned. This is no ordinary video.
As initially noted by EverythingApplePro, a corrupt .MP4 video is making It’s way across the web and is being played back on a variety of devices, specifically iPhones. For some reason, by playing back the video on your iOS device, it’ll cause your phone to begin slowing down and eventually become unusable. The only fix for this issue is to hard reboot your handset by either pressing and holding the Home and power buttons at the same time or the Home and volume down buttons at the same time (for iPhone 7 and 7 Plus users).
Watch the full video below (no, not the actual video. The one by EverythingApplePro on YouTube).
As you can see, simply by playing the video within Safari, your iPhone will eventually crash and become unusable until a hard reboot has taken place. For older devices running iOS 5-7, it’s even worse as the effects of the bug take place almost instantly. In addition, by leaving your phone on a table in its unusable state, it’ll eventually start reloading itself and remain stuck at a processing screen until a hard reboot is performed.
Taking a few steps back for a second, it’s pretty surprising to see that this bug affects devices running software dating all the way back to iOS 5. Why this is the case is beyond me, but there are some theories.
For instance, this issue is likely caused by how iOS handles corrupt video files. A possible memory leak may have taken place which would’ve caused this video to make It’s way to the internet, so by playing it back on an iPhone (or likely an iPad or iPod touch), the OS will have no clue what to do next and just come to a halt. Another possible theory is that this video is just a giant virus and will affect iOS devices until it’s patched up by Apple at a later time, but this seems unlikely due to the fact that devices running v5 of the operating system are affected as well.
Nevertheless, the best thing to do if you fall victim to this video is simply hard reboot your iPhone immediately. As of now, it doesn’t seem like there’s any long-term side effects to playing the video back, but there’s no guarantee. There’s also no guarantee that Apple will roll out a fix for this issue as a part of a new iOS 10 build, however we suggest staying tuned anyway.
Have you been affected by this bug?
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