In the past few years, many different situations have made WhatsApp crash. Be it on Android or iOS, there’s always a certain message, character or wallpaper that freezes your app and requires you to delete the app. Well, now there’s another critical situation: weird long group text messages and virtual contact cards or v-cards.

Messages That Will Crash WhatsApp

This WhatsApp flaw allows hackers to crash your app just by sending you a text. When a user sends you these messages in a group, the app examines their data.

Unfortunately, because of the structure of the message, WhatsApp is unable to render the message. WaBetaInfo notes that the combination of these characters creates a situation where WhatsApp isn’t able to process the message. This then results in an infinite crash. Meaning no matter how many times you open the app, it will crash.

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I prefer it on Telegram

Currently, there isn’t an effective solution to fix this issue. When you get hit by this ‘smooth criminal’ you must reinstall WhatsApp thus losing your chat history. For this reason, I recommend four things:

1. Be wary of the groups you are in. Don’t just get into any random groups
2. Change your settings so that no one is allowed to add you to a group without your permission
3. Back up your chat history at least once a week just to be on the safe side
4. If you receive a message like this, you should block the contact using WhatsApp Web.

As many as 65billion messages are sent via WhatsApp every day. So bugs in the app can seriously affect huge numbers of people. Here’s what the messages and vcards look like

-Anti crash integrated into official WhatsApp: There are messages designed to freeze or crash your WhatsApp. Then there are modded WhatsApp versions that have a “Crashcode protection” like a bigger Unicode database. We need this integrated into the official application. pic.twitter.com/bpyWtFUwQO

— Ian (@Ian_Oli_01) August 15, 2020

The vcards work in a sort of similar way. When you open it, there might be like 100 associated contacts. Every contact has a very long name that contains a crash code.