How to Block the Latest Text Bomb on an iPhone

There’s a new iPhone text bomb in town, and this time, it causes the device to completely freeze without users doing anything, all with just a text message.

Basically, this deadly text message is a combination of a few characters that must include the Italian flag emoji and a specific Sindhi language character, and when these two are put together, the message that you receive causes the iPhone to freeze.


While we’ve seen other text bombs before, this new one is even more harmful, as it can crash your iPhone without you doing anything. For example, similar bugs discovered (and fortunately patched) in the past typically required users to open a specific app where a text was received in order for the freeze to be triggered.

The easy way removal

The easy way is to allow notifications on your device but to disable the message previews. This can be done from every app prone to this bug, including messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger, but also email clients like Mail. The crash can be triggered by pretty much any app that can generate a message preview which includes the deadly characters.

I’ll show you how to do this in WhatsApp, and the steps are similar for the other apps mentioned above as well.

So launch WhatsApp and then follow this path to disable message previews:

WhatsApp > Settings > Notifications > Show Preview > Disable

The hard way

The more painful workaround is to just disable notifications, as this method blocks the previews from showing up in the first place. You can do this for each app or for all of them from the iPhone settings screen.

First of all, you can disable all previews:

iPhone > Settings > Notifications > Show Previews > Never

Then, you can just tap an app from the list to expand its options and then:

Allow Notifications > Off

At this point, that specific app will no longer send you notifications, which means that even if someone sends you the text bomb, the iPhone doesn’t crash.