How one man's Instagram story froze everyones phones as soon as they clicked on it

You might want to steer clear of this particular user's Instagram stories, as they've been proven to freeze and crash almost every phone out there.

Technology can be confusing, and with so many different features in the latest smartphones, it's no surprise that sometimes certain users can exploit different apps and hardware.

You'd think that the latest iPhones and Android devices would be able to keep up with everything, but all of the secret emoji keyboards and game-changing features still can't complete with a bit of simple trickery.

Viral tech 'urban myths' are certainly no new thing, as widespread text messages and even Y2K have been used to strike fear into anyone with a computing device.

The most recent version of this involves a blank profile and an otherwise innocent Instagram story, but it has sent many into a panicked flurry as their phones suddenly stop working.

Instagram user @pgtalal posted two stories to their profile, both of which eventually became highlights on the page, which for most users froze and crashed their phone upon viewing.

The stories - comprised at first glace of a single line of Arabic text - caused panic on social media, with countless users reacting to the apparent bricking of their phone.

Some users were kind enough to warn people of the danger, whereas others took the chance to cause chaos by recommending the story to everyone under the guise of intrigue.

However, not everyone was hit by the issue, as it appeared as if anyone with a newer Android phone was safe. This left iPhone users and anyone with an older device vulnerable to the issue though.

Thanks to an in-depth investigation by YouTube creator 'Mrwhosetheboss' with assistance from cybersecurity researcher Ananay (@ananayarora) though, the true cause of the issue and how you can avoid it has been revealed.

While broadly the crashing issue stems from a lack of system memory on your phone, with older Androids and current iPhones likely not having enough RAM to support the story, it's a bit more complicated than that in reality.

In the video it is revealed that @pgtalal managed to use an HTTP proxy to manipulate the size of two story widgets - a countdown and a poll - so that they were astronomically sized.

The Instagram story highlight has a quiz, countdown and a question on the story which is wayyy out of bounds and the size is HUGE. This causes a rendering issue. pic.twitter.com/iHGItxSF7Y

— Ananay (@ananayarora) May 1, 2021

As a standard these widgets would be anywhere from 0 (non-existent) to 1 (as big as the phone display), but in the two stories in question they were scaled so that they were 907970275584550430x larger than your display, causing a severe memory issue for most phones.

Additionally, it appears as if Apple's iOS is simply incapable of computing this regardless of the lack of RAM, causing an additional issue layer for iPhone users.

This crashing effect has reportedly been fixed for newly created stories, and @pgtalal has made their profile (and subsequently the stories) private so you're unable to view them if you don't follow the account, but they still work as they were originally intended to.

In rather bizarre circumstances, it appears as if the account's owner was just 14 when the stories were created, as revealed in a conversation with Mrwhosetheboss.

They are supposedly a self-taught developer and reportedly only started when they were 11 years old, making the story 'just for fun'.

As tempting as it is to open Pandora's box and view the story yourself, it seems like the best course of action is to steer clear for the safety of your phone as the last thing you'll want is to find that it's been bricked.