A newly discovered odd character bug can cause your iPhones and iPads to briefly crash. This bug is triggered by just typing four characters on your iOS device. On Wednesday, a security researcher found that typing "::" characters in the App Library or Settings app can cause the iPhone's home screen interface, Springboard, to crash.

As pointed out by TechCrunch, all you need to do is type "": followed by any fourth character to trigger the bug. So it's something related to the first three characters of the string. According to iOS security researchers, this is not a security issue and there is "no evidence to suggest that anyone other than an iOS device owner manually typing the characters could trigger this bug."

We tested it on several iPhones running iOS 17 and iOS 18 beta. On iOS 17, typing these characters into the Settings app search bar will cause the app to crash. In the app library, these four characters crashed the Springboard and showed a black screen for 1-2 seconds. However, typing these characters into the Spotlight search had no effect. On iOS 18, the characters did not respawn. But they only closed the Settings app for a fraction of a second and opened it again as usual. Spotlight search also froze very briefly, but there was no crash.

It's worth knowing that this crash or reset isn't a full reset, so it won't erase your data. It will take a few seconds for your iPhone to work again. It also doesn't seem to affect any app or feature on your iPhone or iPad. So it's not as big of a problem as some older character bugs that spread via messages and let people repeatedly crash other users' iPhones. Talking about this error, users will rarely type "":: on their iPhones or iPads, unless they do it deliberately.