This Instagram story will kill your iPhone

Instagram is one of the most popular social media. Almost every event that occurs anywhere in the world is bound to come up on Instagram. Recently an Instagram story went viral. It was a story highlighted on an account named ‘Pgtalal’ on Instagram. The interesting fact about this story is that as soon as you open it on your iPhone or on any old android smartphone, it instantly crashes the complete system of your phone. The phone becomes totally unresponsive. So, what is so weird about this story? How can an Instagram story make your phone go unresponsive?

What is this story?

When you open this story on an android phone, if your phone does not crash, you will see a purple screen with confetti sparkling around. But when you open it on an iPhone, you see only a grey screen with a message written in the Arabic language. You can’t even pause the story by holding your finger on the screen. A YouTuber having the channel as Mrwhosetheboss on youtube dug into this problem and found out the reason behind such absurd behavior of this story. This story is actually made by a 14-year-old boy. He is a self-taught programmer and a full-stack developer. He has around 93.5kfollowers on Instagram. He also has a TikTok account but that doesn’t give any information about him. He designed this story in a very incredible way. He used only a timer and a quiz in it. These stickers can be added to any Instagram story. But, what he did next was shocking. He enlarged these stickers to about 18 digit numbers in size! But how did he do that? Instagram usually limits how much you can enlarge the sticker, right? What he did was he used an HTTP proxy server. He set the normal size of these stickers when making the story but when he posted it, he used a proxy server to change the dimensions of both the stickers to enormous numbers. So, the story was posted from his end, but before going to the Instagram servers, he kind of hijacked it using the proxy server and then sent the edited version of the story to the Instagram servers to publish publically. This story usually affects phones having low RAM.

Why does it affect iPhone more?

Android operating system is capable of processing large dimensions but iOS is not able to do so. So, when you open this story using iPhone, the operating system simply cannot process the image and displays just a grey screen and the message in the Arabic language. Android operating system can process these huge numbers and displays the purple color but older android phones still struggle to do that and crash. The reason behind why this story was created is still a mystery. If you accidentally open this story, don’t worry. Just reboot your phone and everything will be all right.

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Originally published at https://techquickiesp.blogspot.com on May 8, 2021.