Emojis may seem like all fun and games but they have the capacity to crash your WhatsApp messaging platform. If a message contains a string of 6,000 emojis, then the result is the app crashing when the message is opened by any of the 900 million users of the messaging app.
Security researcher Indrajeet Bhuyan discovered this bug and took to a blog post to point out the reason behind the crash. “In WhatsApp web, WhatsApp allows 6,550 to 6,600 characters,” writes Bhuyan. “But after typing about 4,200 to 4,400 smilies, the browser starts to slow down. But since the limit is not yet reached so WhatsApp allows to go on inserting. So it crashes while we type and send and in mobile too when it [the mobile app] receives it overflows the buffer, and it crashes.”
Once the app crashes, the only solution for this bug is to delete the thread. Bhuyan points out that there is a clever benefit to this “emoji bomb”: an individual that wants a thread deleted can use this bug. Take, for example, someone who has sent a sensitive picture or something offensive. They can use this loophole to crash the recipient’s phone and guarantee the recipient deletes the thread.
At the start of the year, on New Years Eve, WhatsApp users in Europe, the U.S. and Canada faced a glitch where they could not respond to chat messages or share new ones. Service was quickly restored but the app crashed once again, showing users the spinning wheel with the word “connecting” at the top.
