Instagram is one of the most popular photo- and video-sharing social media, and its parent Facebook couldn't be anymore proud.
But the thing is about the social media, or any other internet service to be more precise, is that they don't document anything that users should do to keep their phone safe. That main reason for this is because, maintaining a platform is the job of the developers, not the users. And disclosing weaknesses is simply opening one self to potential hacks.
This is why Instagram tends to patch bugs quietly.
But despite having Facebook and its resources behind its back, Instagram still has bugs, and a 14 year old "full stack developer" managed to crash phones around the world by just creating Stories on the social media platform.
Going by the name @Pgtalal, tapping on the account's Story Highlights will crash phones, or render them useless.
People wondered what went wrong, thinking that they may have been hacked, by just opening the Instagram Stories.
This fueled the virality of the account.
When one of the Stories is opened using highend modern Android phones, most of the phones will survive, as they will see the Story showing a purple screen with confetti and a “Your love” song playing in the background. But when the Story is opened using a lower-powered Android, or even an iOS device, the phone will either struggle, or an Arabic text will open up, and crash the phone.
Users who opened the Story cannot long-tap or close.
As explained by Arun Maini, a popular YouTuber that goes with the name Mrwhosetheboss, after conducting a research himself and even received a reply for the Pgtalal himself, he explained that the Instagram Story is nothing more than a normal Story on the platform, meaning that it doesn't have a malware or sort.
However, this Pgtalal managed to insert some of his code inside the Story, before the Story reached Instagram's servers, in an act that is popularly called the "man-in-the-middle attack."
Through this HTTP Proxy method, Pgtalal managed to modify the Story in order for it to consume tons of RAM when opened.
A dive into Pgtalal's Story, inspecting it will reveal that it included two Instagram Stickers: a countdown and a poll. Nothing weird, until seeing the numbers.
Normally, Instagram Stickers have a height and width somewhere between 0 and 1, Pgtalal increased these an eight-digit numbers.
The large size explains the purple background on Android and the grey background on iOS. They are just a small part of the countdown and poll stickers, respectively.
Also, the reason why people cannot pause the Story is because they are seeing the non-responsive part of the Story.
High-powered Android phones that pack huge memory can deal with this huge sticker sizes. But most low-powered Android phones, and Apple devices that tend to have smaller RAM, can fail when rendering the Story.
For those Instagram users who tapped on the Story and experiencing their phone crashing, all they need to do is reboot the phone.
Restarting a phone will simply clear everything in its memory, allowing the phone to return with an empty RAM and cache.
This is not the first time that even an iPhone can crash when dealing with a seemingly simple thing.
For example, there was the time when a Telegu character bug created havoc when it caused a lot of iPhones to crash due to iOS being unable to decode the character. Then, there was the Sindhi-character bug that also crashed iPhones.
There was also a case where an image of the sun setting beyond the mountains can crash phones when the image is used as a wallpaper.