If You Send THIS Text To A Friend's Phone, It'll Shut It Down!

I tried this on one of the girls in the newsroom, and sure enough... It actually works, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. At first, I thought it was kinda cool that I could shut someones phone down for a few seconds, then I thought, surely this can't be a good thing!? Right?

Apple are furiously trying to work out a fix to the bug in its 'Messages' which shuts a phone down after a certain combination of characters have been received.

Basically when someone sends a text message with the characters ‘effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗’, there’s a chance that your phone will reboot.

BUT, here's the thing... No one actually knows what the long term damage is when it happens so it's probably NOT a good idea to give it a go.

There is a way that you can fix your phone and stop it from happening though.

If you go into settings, then notifications, then Messages and turn the ‘show on local screen’ off and under the ‘alert style when unlocked’ choose ‘none’.

It doesn't work on all phones, and here's something to remember, sometimes it backfires with some users saying that after they SENT the text message they couldn't access messages or contacts

This effective power text is basically making me block all my contacts

— Jeremy Shayne (@jeremyshayne) May 27, 2015

mark my words, this "effective. power" thing is about to explode the internet

— porter robinson (@porterrobinson) May 27, 2015

imagine ur finally about to take a selfie with ur fav and someone sends u an effective power off text and shuts ur phone down

— savagina | 9 DAYS (@pizzapopniall) May 27, 2015