A bug has been discovered in iOS which allows a particular message to cause the iPhone's Messages app to crash indefinitely.
The bug was discovered (as all things are) on reddit when eagle-eyed users found that by sending a particular set of arabic characters in an iMessage, the recipient's iPhone would immediately crash and restart.
Upon turning itself back on, the Messages app would become completely unresponsive - crashing every time it was opened.
There is however, good news. The damage is by no means permanent or unfixable.
MacRumours reports that if you happened to be looking at the conversation when you received the text, simply replying in the conversation will prevent the phone from crashing.
If you weren't directly looking at the conversation the phone will crash and you'll need to wait until it resets. Once it's done that though it appears as though sending yourself a message will help break the cycle of crashes.
You can do this through Siri by simply asking the phone to: 'Send myself a message'
Reddit user 'sickestdancer98' claims that the bug is tied into the notifications api with the comment thread saying:
"We found out what it is. it is due to how the banner notifications process the Unicode text. The banner briefly attempts to present the incoming text and then "gives up" thus the crash."
Twitter user @iGadgets__ has reportedly spoken to Apple who told them that they're aware of the issue and it's being fixed presently.