The ‘Black Dot’ Message On Whatsapp Could Crash Your Phone, Watch Out!

There are messages that have been circulating on Whatsapp that cause the app – and at times your phone- to crash. The most recent culprit is the ‘black-dot message.’

According to a thread on Reddit and a YouTube post, the message comes in a number of different forms and is quite hard to spot. There are a variety of messages being sent that can crash your Whatsapp, and one of the more popular ones is a “This is very interesting” message that comes with an emoji. Once a reader opens this message their Whatsapp instantly freezes and proceeds to crash.

I really don’t know why anyone would forward this prank unless they are not aware of what the message can actually do. These crashes could result in loss of messages that have not been backed up on the end of the receiver so it might be best if people desist from sending this kind of stuff.

The black dot does not discriminate. Apparently, it affects users on both Android and iOS equally. It is not clear if the bugs can actually access your phone but it appears they just affect Whatsapp

Recent encounter…

I’m yet to encounter the black dot personally but this past weekend I encountered a different ‘bug’ that causes Whatsapp to crash. The message read:

Hello Guys I’m Bluestacks’ basically a Zimbabwean… I’m an ethical hacker … I spent 3 hours to develop this virus massage …. It won’t destroy your phone(its interesting)

This message will hang your Whatsapp

Just double click on “don’t touch here”

…..

don’t-touch-here

I thought it was one of those silly hoaxes but when I touched the “don’t-touch-here” part of the message, my Whatsapp came to a halt and then proceeded to force close. This bug seems to be affecting Android users only and our companions on iOS seem to be immune to this one.

This is a thing now?

I’m not sure when these bugs became popular but over the last few days I seem to be coming across them more frequently so I guess this is becoming a trend. Hopefully, none of these bugs will have more devastating effects.

If you have low storage on your phone it might not be the wisest idea to interact with either of these bugs because you could end up losing your messages when your Whatsapp crashes.