An Instagram story, now converted to ‘Story Highlight’, posted by the user ‘@pgtalal’ is crashing iPhones around the world. Instagram users trying to view the story are left with a crashed iPhone as the phone fails to load the story and stops working abruptly.
This is not the first time we’re witnessing an iPhone crash to a simple thing such as an Instagram story. Back in 2018, a Telegu character bug created havoc when it caused a lot of iPhones to crash due to iOS not being able to decode the character. Even in 2015, a set of Arabic characters caused iPhone’s Message app to crash.
Instagram Story Crashing iPhone
https://twitter.com/ONIKASTOE/status/1387646058516205570
Instagram Story posted by the user ‘@pgtalal’ is crashing iPhones around the world. When you click on the story, you’ll see the story with a gray screen with some random Arabic text written on it loading up on your iPhone. But the iPhone will stop in between loading the story, and the phone will become unresponsive.
Mrwhosetheboss took a deep dive into this story and revealed how this Story is crashing iPhones. He says that ‘@pgtalal’ created a Story with two enormously large stickers. Normally, a sticker has a height and width between 0 and 1 inch, but the stickers he used in the Story are very large, in the order of ten million inches.
Although Instagram does not allow you to post stickers more than 1 inch long, this user used HTTP Proxy to manually change the height and width of the sticker on Instagram’s server. As a result of this sticker being so large, the iPhone fails to render it and crashes.
What to do if you crashed your iPhone?
In case you try to view the story and are left with a crashed iPhone, don’t worry, your iPhone can be restored to normal working condition. Follow these steps to restore your iPhone.
Step 1. Press and quickly release the Volume Up button.
Step 2. Now, press and quickly release the Volume Down button.
Step 3. Press and hold the Power button until the Apple logo appears.
Your iPhone should boot up as normal. In case you’re still having issues using your iPhone, try to delete and re-install the Instagram app.
