BY JASON MURDOCK
It may look innocent, but a simple WhatsApp message containing a small black dot emoji can be used to crash your app or smartphone in seconds. Inside the Reddit community for the Facebook-owned chat service, users have complained for days about the glitch—known as a “text bomb”—which stores thousands of hidden characters that will overwhelm the app if clicked. The text in circulation shows the emoji and a short message reading: “Touch here.” While invisible on the screen, the text bomb stores approximately 6,000 Unicode characters that are used to dictate how letters display in order of left-to-right or right-to-left. Multiple computer experts who analyzed the backend code suggest WhatsApp is currently unable to process changes of text direction at scale.
It is believed that the booby-trapped texts mostly impact devices on Google’s Android OS. WhatsApp and Google did not respond to a request for comment.
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