Can one SMS with Arabic letters really crash your iPhone?

A text message with Arabic characters can apparently crash an iPhone when attempting to delete it.

According to the Huffington Post, British engineer and TV personality Tom Scott, who produces explanatory YouTube clips believes the apparent iPhone bug is very real.

Scott speculates the bug is caused by a sequence of Arabic letters in the middle of a text message which causes the iPhone’s apparent confusion when trying to shorten the text.

The phone shortens messages to a length that is appropriate for notification. In Arabic, characters will shrink when they become part of a word, but when certain characters are deleted, the word can split up into even larger and more space-consuming characters.

This linguistic anomaly is what seemingly confuses an iPhone causing it to lock the messages app or reset itself.

The text message most associated with the iPhone crash is لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً which gradually gets longer via deletion of its nonsensical letters.

Apple has not confirmed or denied the apparent bug but said it is aware of a bug relating to the Arabic text and has hinted in comments made to the media that it will be fixed in an upcoming software update.