Apple's iOS operating system was recently at the receiving end of several criticisms following the discovery of a five-second video that can cause an iPhone to lock up and completely freeze. The bug was discovered by Reddit users. Triggering the bug is as simple as opening an MP4 file and watching the video.

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In a test conducted by The Verge, the tech portal reported that iPhones running on the latest iOS version 10.1 updates and beta copies of iOS version 10.2 are the ones affected by the bug. The report added that all phones used during the test locked up seconds after playing the video.

The said video can be sent through iMessage. Once the intended recipient opens the file, it will play using the default video player. The video in question appears to be corrupt causing it to generate a loop, which in turn could render the iPhone to crash around 10 seconds after playing it.

A close inspection of the bug reveals that it can trigger an iPhone to crash if it is sent as a link. If the corrupted video is simply transferred as a file, it will not cause the phone to malfunction.

The only way to recover from the crash it to perform a hard reset by holding the power button and home button at the same time. Reports claim that affected iPhones will work normally once it has rebooted.

This is not the first time a bug that can crash an iPhone was discovered. About a year ago, a sting of test message can cause Apple's iMessage app to malfunction. This bug was later patched with iOS 8.4.

According to USA Today, they tried to play the same video on a Samsung Galaxy S7 running on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and they did not encounter any issue.

TagsiPhone, apple, Apple iPhone, iOS, iOS 10, video bug, iphone crash