The Text Message That’s Crashing iPhones: How To Stop ‘Effective Power’ Text From Crashing Your Phone [Video]

There’s one single text message that’s being sent around that can crash a person’s iPhone immediately. Just today, someone received the “effective. Power ?????????????????? ? ?h ? ? ?” text, and upon opening the text, all activities on the iPhone 6 Plus in question were halted and rebooted, including the excellent video of a TED Talk about infidelity.

effective. Power ?????????????????? ? ?h ? ? ? Copy and paste ^^ Text that to somebody with a iPhone it makes it turn off and on

— ?jeff (@Adorsed) May 27, 2015

Apparently, that effective power text has crashed enough iPhones for fixes for the iPhone text crash to emerge, reports Cosmopolitan. The fix reported therein involves using Notes to send and share a message.

IF ONE MORE PERSON TEXTS ME THAT EFFECTIVE POWER THING, IM GONNA FLIP.

— Jillian Rhodes (@JillRho) May 28, 2015

Reportedly, a fix to the iOS bug for the “effective. Power ?????????????????? ? ?h ? ? ?” text message is in the works, according to an Apple spokesperson, so check for those software updates soon on your iPhone.

“We are aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update.”

Another fix for the text message crash involves users going into their settings, then notifications, then messages to turn off notifications to the lock-screen by sliding the “show on lock screen” setting to the off position. Also, the “alert style when unlocked” can be switched to “none” to reportedly avoid the iPhone-crashing text message — however, many iPhone users like having these notifications available for other messages.

anyone who got the effective power thing, if you go into iphoto and send a random picture to whoever sent you that it should fix it

— Nicholas Glaze (@nglaze_donut) May 28, 2015

Other fixes reportedly include sending any photo to the person who sent you the effective-power text in the first place.

A video posted to YouTube on May 27, showing the bug in action, has received more than 134,000 views.

Discovered by Reddit users, the bug’s longterm effects are unknown, but one can only imagine the havoc one could wreak from constantly sending the “effective power” crash text message to a person’s iPhone, iPad, and other devices. Now the number of Reddit threads about shutting off other iPhones via a simple text message are growing in leaps and bounds.

As reported by the Inquisitr, iPhones made it into a recent rhyme from Jay Z, who spoke of folks buying them and making the late Steve Jobs rich.

When you get hit with the effective power text pic.twitter.com/4c1k2nuXFp

— Arjun (@kash_ballin) May 28, 2015

[Image via Twitter]