How to Fix WhatsApp Text Bomb Crash
A recently discovered vulnerability in WhatsApp – I use the term more broadly than usual because this vulnerability itself doesn’t seem to be an application bug – can lead to an incredibly nasty crash loop if some dumb user sends you an application message. I can’t handle it.
We’ve seen this trick before: By adding incomprehensible characters to a message that WhatsApp doesn’t know how to process, the sender can disable the recipient’s application. But this is not a one-time joke; when you try to download WhatsApp it tries again to process characters it can’t handle and crashes again.
Since your WhatsApp chat history is tied to your device and not stored in the cloud, one quick way to fix this problem is to uninstall and reinstall the app. This will erase your chats and make the app work again, but there is a catch. Anything you haven’t created before will disappear forever.
If you run into this problem, there is another trick reported by Tom’s Guide :
If you do receive one of these suspicious messages, there is a potential way to safely get rid of it. If you log into WhatsApp Web on your desktop or laptop, block the user who sent the message, then set the privacy to “My contacts” or “My contacts other than …” and finally delete the message, you will avoid a potential problem.
However, this only works if you already have a WhatsApp web session open, so this is not a solution if your application is already crashing and cannot access the menu that allows you to customize it.
If I were you – and I was an avid WhatsApp user – I would just do a web session right now, just in case. It will take less than one minute, and by checking the “Stay signed in” checkbox, you can easily access WhatsApp from your computer’s browser until WhatsApp releases a fix for the issue. (I’m sure it’s on the way.)
If not, make sure you back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive or iCloud . In fact, I would do it right now and then set a regular backup frequency so that you don’t lose your chats in the future for some other weird reason. You should never be too careful!