Some of the most sophisticated technology that we have access to can be undone with four simple characters.

A glitch was recently found in iPhone’s IOS that can cause the device to crash by typing in four seemingly random characters.

Typing “”:: into the search bar of the Settings app or in the search bar of your App Library – which can be found by swiping all the way to the right on your phone – will cause the phone to freeze up, crashing the iPhone’s Springboard — or the app that controls the home screen. It also closes the Settings menu before sending you back to the lock screen.

The bug was discovered by a security researcher on Mastodon and verified by TechCrunch after being shared.

Additional verification was done by 9to5MAC, who tested it on multiple versions.

9to5Mac tested this on multiple iPhones and multiple iOS versions. With the latest version of iOS 17, typing these characters causes Springboard—the iPhone Home Screen interface—to crash and “soft” reboot.

Typing these characters with iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 causes Spotlight Search to freeze very briefly, but Springboard does not fully crash.

Thankfully, it’s more a bug than a security risk, according to researchers.

“It’s not a security bug,” said Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug, told TechCrunch.

It also seems to only be able to be triggered by the device user, unlike similar “text bomb” bugs that have been used by hackers in recent years.

It appears the characters trigger a “Respring,” which is more or less a simple restart of SpringBoard, so technically they are a shortcut for refreshing your phone without having to fully reboot it.

One iOS developer even suggested in response to the original Mastodon post that the bug is “actually a pretty useful feature.”

But that’s not technical advice.

That being said, I wouldn’t go typing random characters into your phone’s search bar just to see what happens.

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.