Sending an iPhone User To This Website Will Immediately Crash Their Phone

January 27, 2016

Be extra careful when clicking unknown links as you might fall victim to an annoying prank that is circulating right now in social media. A website link shared via various online methods can crash your iPhone in an instant.

According to the Daily Dot, the website link CrashSafari.com literally causes the iOS browser on iPhones and iPads to crash and immediately reboot.

Along with a click-bait tweet, Twitter pranksters pass the link around disguising it with URL shorteners to make it harder to detect. It is highly suggested that if you come across a shortened URL and you are partially curious if it is indeed the latest Justin Bieber track, use URL Expander or another similar tool to check the link first before clicking.

Crashing my iPod touch. #CrashSafari pic.twitter.com/gSlBmD8aKw

— Sean Sullivan (@5ean5ullivan) January 25, 2016

While mildly annoying, the link does not actually do any real harm to your Apple device. If for some reason you are intrigued, you may waste a few seconds by clicking here. The device comes back to normal after being reset.

Open Whisper Systems software and security engineer Frederic Jabobs explains that the site manages to overload Safari by utilizing a program that continuously adds characters to the URL bar.

“Very quickly, the browser runs out of memory and the process in charge of loading that page is killed by the iOS operating system to prevent the phone to be unresponsive,” Jacobs told the Dot.

Created by 22-year-old Matthew Bryant, who works in application security in San Francisco, the link has been around for more than a year now but just gained popularity again on Monday. Apple is reportedly aware of the crash issue and is currently looking into a fix.

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