Several iPhone and iPad owners have started to receive ‘ghostly’ emails dated from several decades ago.
Users on Reddit say the Mail app is serving up messages from ‘January 1, 1970’, absent of any sender details or content, and cannot be opened. Some wondered if this was an attempt by hackers to try and disable their device.
January 1, 1970 represents point zero in UNIX time – the way that computers often understand times and dates, with each second since midnight on that date marking a different point in UNIX time. This means that if an email is sent without any time data, or a time zone bug means that the email data cannot be interpreted properly, the device will default to its zero hour.
And it seems that the bug can be conquered by closing the email app then performing a hard reset of the device.
The issue is the second time-hopping error to affect iOS devices in recent weeks. Last month, iPhone users were warned to take care when setting the date on their devices after a number of customers found that inadvertently changing the year to January 1 1970 ‘bricked’ their device.
This news led many observers to question why iPhones, which were first launched in 2007, even have the option to turn the clock back all the way to the 1970s, especially when the devices set the time automatically.
How much do you know about the iPhone? Take our quiz!
US auto safety regulator opens new investigation into adequacy of Tesla Autopilot recall, saying it…
Thoma Bravo agrees to acquire Darktrace for $5.32 billion in cash, delivering some welcome news…
Customer adoption of AI services embedded in cloud services continues to deliver results for Microsoft,…
TikTok's 'secret source' algorithm is so core to ByteDance, it would rather shut down US…
After relocating from California to Texas in 2020, Oracle's Larry Ellison now reveals plan to…
Share price hit after Meta admits heavy AI spending plans, after posting strong first quarter…