Hyphen iPhone Bug

About

Hyphen iPhone Crash refers to a bug in IOS 12.1 that crashes your iPhone by saying “hyphen” five times while using voice input.^[1] This bug has be utilized in pranks in which someone convinces the phone owner that all their data has been reset during the crash.

Origin

On February 13th, 2019, EverythingApplePro uploaded a video to Youtube explaining and demonstrating the bug. The video gained 715,200 views in a month (shown below).

Spread

On February 14th, 2019, Joe Ritter uploaded another hyphen bug demonstration video that gained over 96,100 views in a month(shown below, left). The glitch became a popular phenomenon in the next month as more Youtubers reported on the bug and gained thousands of views on their videos like Randomized Life's video on March 16th (shown below, right).

In late February, using the hyphen iPhone bug in TikTok prank videos became popular. Those filming the video typically approach a person using their phone and ask to see it. Then they say "hyphen" five times into the the voice input and reveal that by doing so they reset or erased all of their phone data. On March 24th, 2019, TikTok user @Pedro C Vitola, pranked their coworkers in a TikTok video that gained 16,100 likes in two days (shown below, left). On March 26th, 2019, @user015421 uploaded a video in Polish demonstrating the prank (shown below, right). The video gained 12,600 likes in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References