Stability and reliability are essential when picking out a communication service. What good is a tool that’s inoperable when you need it, right? Occasional outages aside, WhatsApp is quite stable and there when you need anend-to-end encrypted messaging solution. However, a new bug triggered by a link is making multiple versions of WhatsApp crash immediately.
We’ve seen similar issues before. Two years ago, awallpaper took the internet by stormbecause it contained one single pixel which killed your phone instantly. Five years back,a message containing a black circle emojiwith a string of invisible characters embedded into it exploited a bug in Android’s text rendering engine that caused several apps to crash, including WhatsApp.
This new WhatsApp bug is less severe by comparison, only crashing the app as soon as you open a group or individual chat containing the problematic link (wa.me/settings). The link usually redirects you to WhatsApp’s settings, but now it’s crashing the Android version of Meta’s popular chat app, as discovered and verified byMayur Pandyaon Twitter.
The bug seems to affect both individual chats and group chats, even on WhatsApp Business. Opening a chat with the link triggers the crash, but the app restarts normally thereafter, until you open that message thread again. After Twitter userBrute Beeshared the bug, it caught the attention ofAndroid Authority, who then confirmed version 2.23.10.77 of the app is impacted. Still, there’s a high likelihood that users of other versions are suffering as well.
The exact cause of this appears to be buried in how WhatsApp resolves the actual URL behind the shortened link identified as the trigger. While this is certainly something WhatsApp has to fix, a quick workaround is available. WhatsApp Web seems to be unaffected by this bug, so you cansign in through your browserand delete the message in the chat triggering the crash. After that, WhatsApp on your phone should not crash unless someone sends you the same link again.
We don’t condone it, but WhatsApp Web can also be used to send this problematic link to other people — that’s how it was probably sent to you. Just don’t panic if you have WhatsApp crashing on you repeatedly. The fix seems simple enough and should be usable until WhatsApp patches the issue on its end.
