Have you ever had an evil plan of crashing your friend’s WhatsApp application? It can be done easily just by sending them a flood of emojis and before they will know it, they won’t be able to use WhatsApp at all! This is a bug that was recently discovered by Indrajeet Bhuyan who is an independent researcher who has found many other bugs on WhatsApp previously as well. This current bug can affect any of the WhatsApp users no matter which device they are using which includes Android as well as the web client for WhatsApp.
Let us first see how to crash someone’s WhatsApp using this bug and, later on, we will take a look at why this bug affects anyone and how you can protect yourself from this bug.
Crash WhatsApp by sending emojis – Make a New Year Joke With Your Friend
WhatsApp is an app in which boring text conversations can be made into fun talks and messages using the emojis that it provides. It is amazing to see how well these emojis let us communicate with our friends. But what if these emojis become a boon and become a reason of frustration? The same happens when you send an awful lot of emojis to your friends and the number of emojis you need to send someone is around 4000 plus.
It really doesn’t matter which emoji you choose to send, they will all work the same way and will force the receiver’s WhatsApp to crash. Here’s a video that will show you how it works. All credits for the video goes to Indrajeet Bhuyan.
Now that you know how this bug works and how you can make your friend’s WhatsApp crash just by sending them thousands of emojis, it is time to explain why exactly it happens and why it affects the receiver.
Why does this bug affect the receiver?
This is not the first bug on WhatsApp that forces a crash of the application just by receiving a message. In fact, this bug works on the same lines of an older bug that was discovered by Indrajeet itself and was later patched by WhatsApp. In the old bug, if anyone sent a message compiled with 2000 or more words – 2KB in size, then the receiver of the message would face a crash of their WhatsApp application.
WhatsApp fixed (or patched) this bug by limiting the number of characters one could send in a single message on WhatsApp but this fix was not applied on emojis and hence this was discovered when Indrajeet tried sending about 4000 emojis as a test.
The WhatsApp client on the receiving side became unresponsive and crashed as a result of receiving such a large message. It doesn’t matter which platform WhatsApp is being used on as it can easily affect anyone on Android or even the web based client that works on Google Chrome, Opera and Firefox.
How to protect yourself?
Now, this is a public bug and there are chances that some of your mischievous friends might be plotting to attack you with this bug. Here is how to protect yourself from this bug.
If someone sends you a message with such huge number of emojis, the one and only thing that you should do is delete the whole chat with them. This will delete all the messages you might have exchanged with them in the past, but you can first email the chat to yourself just in case you want to keep a backup.
