iOS iMessage crashing bug also affects Twitter and Snapchat

There's a new found bug on iOS that allows any of your contacts to crash your iMessage app (sometimes even iOS itself) by simply texting you a special string of unicode characters. But now it seems the problem isn't restricted to just that and affects several others, like Twitter and Snapchat.

Depending on what type of friends/enemies you have, you may find out that one of them has texted you the offending message, crashing your iMessage app. Apple has already acknowledged the issue, and until it releases a fix it suggests you simply use Siri to send a message to that same person. As long as the "special string" is not the last message, the iMessage app will work as usual.

But now it seems the same character sequence crashes Twitter and Snapchat as well, and for Snapchat it seems there's no way to recover from it - with that thread becoming inaccessible (until a fix comes out).

I can imagine someone at Cupertino thinking at this very moment; "things were so much simpler back when we only had to deal with 8 bits ASCII characters"! But until a fix comes out, you better get ready for prankster friends... or anyone that finds this sort of stuff amusing.

For me, I just find it amusing to see that with so much technology... even displaying a (not so) simple string of characters can cause such much trouble.