Apple releases software updates to all four of its consumer operating systems to address an issue that allowed usage of the Indian Telugu character to cause devices to crash.
The updates labeled iOS 11.2.6, watchOS 4.2.3, tvOS 11.2.6, and macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 Supplemental Update, are all available to download on supported devices.
The macOS High Sierra update comes about one month after the first version of macOS High Sierra 10.13.3, which offered fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities discovered in early January. And the iOS 11.2.6 is the eleventh official update to the iOS 11 operating system, that comes approximately one month after the launch of iOS 11.2.5, an update that introduced support for the HomePod, Control Center updates, Siri news, and bug fixes.
The updates do not add any new features to any of the platforms, and offer no other security updates.
Telugu is an Indian language that stands alongside Hindi, English and Bengali as one of the few languages with official primary language status in more than one Indian state. As the primary language in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and in the town of Yanam (Puducherry), it's also spoken by significant minorities in other places.
It's also one of the six languages designated a classical language of India by the Government of India.
The problem here, is Apple's operating systems were found to be crashing or freezing when one of the character in the language in question was received in a message, encountered in a document, or pasted into a text field. It affected all apps from Messages, Safari web browser, to third-party apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
The flaw was so bad that some people began trolling Apple users by posting the character to Twitter and elsewhere, causing Apple devices to experience app crashes.
The flaw on Apple's operating systems was because they couldn't render the alphabet.
In Messages, for example, receiving the character can freeze up the app on all of a user's Mac and iOS devices. The Messages app then refuses to function properly.
Things can get worse when the message with the character in question was sent to a chat group, for example. If many of the participating users in the group use iPhones, that single message should be enough to take them all down.
What's more, if a notification includes the character, Springboard (the part of iOS that manages notifications) will reset. If users reboot their iPhones before Springboard resets, their devices will go into a boot loop and will refuse to start up.
Prior to these updates, the only fix was to delete the entire conversation containing the buggy character with the person who sent it.