Prank Website Crashes iPhones, Chrome, And Firefox Browsers

Thousands of internet users are falling victim to a prank today that crashes their web browser just by visiting a website.

The URL crashsafari.com, when visited, appears to crash Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones, iPads and Macs. However, TechWeekEurope ‘tested’ the link on both Chrome and Firefox browsers on Windows laptops, where the URL also forced a crash.

According to The Guardian, one of the crash URLs has already been clicked on more than 100,000 times.

Reboot

On iPhones, the URL opens to a page of self-generating text that eventually forces the iPhone to restart, heating up the device in the process due to the intense processor work going on in the background.

TechWeekEurope has contacted Apple for comment but the firm has yet to issue a statement at the time of publication.

iPhone users suffered a similar fate last May when an SMS containing Arabic text forced the phones to crash.

The bug reportedly made devices reboot just by receiving a text. Any iPhone that got the text instantly crashes and reboots, as long as the recipient is not viewing their message history at the time.

Last June, Skype had to scramble to fix a bug that caused a number of its applications to crash if a user received a message made up of just eight specific characters.

The issue affected a number of platforms for the Skype client, including Windows, Android, and iOS.

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