Every so often, an exploit causing iPhones to crash will pop up. Many times, those exploits will come in different forms. The previous one was a single line that was spread via text message. The newest involves a video played in Safari that will eventually slow down the iPhone.
The malicious video, discovered on Tuesday morning, appears to play without issue at first, but the longer it plays, the slower an iPhone will respond, eventually causing a complete crash that requires the iPhone to be rebooted via a hard reset to become operational again.
Quick Note to iPhone 7 & 7+ users: A hard reset on your device is still possible, but the process has changed. To perform a hard reset, hold down the Volume down and Power buttons at the same time until your iPhone reboots.
The YouTube channel EverythingApplePro has posted a video demonstrating the effect that the video has on your iPhone. While the bug was just recently discovered, it affects iPhones dating back to those running iOS 5, up to iOS 10.2 beta 3.
According to a post on Reddit, the domains currently hosting the video include vk.com and testtrial.site90.net, but it can easily be hosted on other websites, and masked with URL shorteners, so be careful when opening links on your iPhone.
While it’s nice that this hack seems fairly harmless since it likely won’t actually damage your hardware, it’s annoying nonetheless, and with any luck Apple will figure out the problem and patch it in a future update.