A lot of people have been complaining about this Instagram Story that is killing iPhones and this article attempts to explain what’s happening

Instagram Story From Hell: Death of iPhones

Many users have been complaining and they have been taking to Twitter to complain about the issue.

one of my friend's phone crashed after opening pgtalal's Instagram story on iPhone.

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I prefer it on Telegram

what the f*** is going on?

— सुमित Writes (@aryal_sumit) May 6, 2021

What’s Happening?

Well, there’s an account going by the name @pgtalal who has peculiar highlights on his profile.

When you click on them, your experience depends on the device you are using. On an Android, you’ll see a purple screen with confetti and hear a song called ‘ your love ‘.  On iPhones, when you click it, you’ll see a grey screen with Arabic text and your phone becomes unresponsive.

Who’s Doing this?

As of now, we don’t know who it is exactly but he is definitely trying to scam people on purpose. His page’s biography says that he is a full stack developer. He has also been posting the views as if it’s a trophy to him.

What’s He doing?

So I’m not gonna explain so much into what’s happening yet but go straight to the point. In short, @pgtalal is @adding really large stickers to Instagram stories and phones can’t handle it.

In depth, the stickers should be about 0-1 inches in size. The stickers this guy is making are many many times larger than the entire earth.

So, in terms of phones handling, phones with small Random Access Memories (RAM) like iPhones and older androids cannot handle the work.

This is why Androids can only see purple. This is because the sicker he is using is the count down sticker which is purple in colour.

This explains why you can’t pause the story. This is because it is not really the story, because it’s actually a non interactive part of a sticker.

Okay so now I know you may have tried it and it’s not working. You can’t enlarge it from Instagram. So, how does he do this?

How did he do it?

He is using something a HTTP proxy. This is a software that allows him to see and modify what he is posting before it reaches the Instagram servers.

With this power then nothing can stop him. Instagram cannot stop him as they did not set limits for this. So whether or not your phone can handle this depends on whether your phone can handle it.

This is why iPhones, that all have low RAM and old androids cannot do much to stop their phones from crashing from this Instagram hack.

Oh yeah, and the person doing this is 14 years old. A self taught developer, from the age of 11?