How THIS instagram story kills your phone.

So apparently if you click on

this

guy's Instagram

story

your

phone

stops working, but that's obviously not true. Uh oh shh,

this

has been the reaction of tens of thousands of people over the last week after their smart

phone

crashed due to an Instagram

story

and the internet went down. going crazy about it, there are articles, news, people who have created guides on how to get around it and Twitter is full of people who have just been victims of it, people who don't believe it and are about to be, or people who don't believe it and they are about to be. planning long term strategies to get the victims to fall into the trap, but some friends and I decided to make this our life's mission and we found out what, who, how and why, and somehow we managed to recreate it.

Here is the top level summary. There is an account called pg talal. It has two main Instagram Stories on its page and if you click on them you will have a very different experience depending on what type of device you are on. On Android phones you will see a simple purple screen with confetti and you will hear this song called

your

love which at this stage is now permanently burned into my brain and you will also notice that strangely, unlike other Instagram stories, for some reason, on You cannot pause these by holding down your finger. on them it's almost like this person is taking control of your phone, but then if you click on the same Instagram story on an iPhone, you'll see a gray screen with what looks like Arabic text and your phone will stop responding for complete.

I had so many. questions like how can an Instagram story have so much power, why they look like two different things depending on what phone you're using, and what you're trying to do here. This doesn't seem like harmless fun if you're hacking people. Stealing people's details Are you trying to delete Instagram? We had to find out now, you might remember the video I made about that wallpaper that crashed people's phones if they applied it and in that video I came to the conclusion that it was an accident that someone had. I took a photo and accidentally edited it in a way that makes phones die, but is it just me or does this one look like it was on purpose?

I mean, look at his profile, this talal guy is not trying to hide these stories, if anything, he is proud. inviting people to click on them, he's posted updates on how many views the stories have gotten, like it's some kind of trophy, he's created new blocks from the original two, which I'll get to, and also, if anyone can manage something like this, it's a complete stack. developer this guy claims to be someone who can build both the front-end and back-end of a piece of software, aka someone who knows what he's doing. I'm not criticizing, I mean, he created this thing.

People are fascinated by it. It makes a lot of sense for him to try to grow from this; In fact, it's become one of the fastest-growing new accounts on Instagram with its single top feed post reaching two million views before it was deleted, but the point is that this glitch is nothing. accident, so to try to figure out what the hell was going on here I had to look at all the information available. There wasn't much Talal doesn't have a profile photo. Most of the text is in Arabic. The only publication he had was a strange compilation. from monika from friends also with a caption in arabic and the only personal things i could find about him were his personal account which is private and his tic tac account which is literally just him concentrating back and forth on the lyrics n, like I said, not much. to work, but I thought okay, the only thing I can do from the beginning is use Google Lens to translate all this text into Arabic.

It turns out that the title of his post simply redirects people to his personal account and story titles. Which is phones failing just translates to something good that I went through and something bittersweet that wasn't as enlightening as I had hoped, but then I had an idea and thought the best thing to do if I couldn't find any data was to create the data, so With a heavy heart I pulled out a phone after the following Instagram installed on them visited these stories and monitored with horror and fascination what was happening to each of them, it felt like sending my babies to torture, but I learned something interesting, the general .

The online consensus has been if you have an iPhone, stay away, but if you have an Android, you're good, that's not true because yeah, if I watch this story on a super modern Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra with 16GB of RAM and the latest Android version. It's okay if I try to watch it on a phone that doesn't have Instagram stories, you understand, but if I try to watch it on a mid-range Nokia phone from a few years ago, it's definitely struggling with something that's not the only thing Nokia has been struggling with. . recently and if I try it on a really cheap old Android phone it will crash and crash badly when I tried it it wouldn't even open Instagram story and from the moment I clicked on it the phone couldn't do anything. none of the buttons worked, the screen didn't work, a popup appeared saying that the entire system is not responding, but I couldn't take action because the system was not responding.

This video, I swear, has been almost traumatic, but you are. enjoying it, then a subscription to the channel would be therapeutic, so we have three groups of Android phones here, the most powerful ones are fine, the middle ones struggle, but eventually they manage to survive and the weak ones die, so at this point I thought, oh! Of course, the reason phones crash is because he did something to this story, meaning it requires a lot of processing power or RAM to run. I never want to listen to this song again, and that would also explain why almost all iPhones crash.

Because even the highest-end iPhones right now are limited to six gigabytes of RAM, I knew I was on the right track, but I wasn't there yet, so I did what any brave soldier would do, yeah , I asked other people, I basically assembled the technology. Avengers, I reached out to iOS developers, xda developers, Java and Flutter developers, Android experts as Gary explains, and my number one choice on this was Annanet, who is a cybersecurity researcher at Arizona State University and we have some answers so the best way to understand. The reason an Instagram story is causing phones to crash is to understand what's in that Instagram story and it turns out it's a little bit more than just those Arabic characters that you can see, so what Aninae was showing me is that If you go to Instagram via web and drill down into the watch tab, you can see all the raw data behind every post and every story on any profile.

I feel like it's a whole video just on how much data is collected, but how amazing for the purposes of this. The video is what we found when we inspected Pg Talal's Instagram stories so you know that Instagram has these stickers that you can add as a poll, a question, or a countdown. They're like little widgets that anyone watching these stories can interact with. On their own this won't put a huge strain on your device, but using Inspect we can see that what pg Tile has done is create two of these elements at the same time, one of them being a countdown that was created to finish. on October 23, 2020 and one of them is a questionnaire that only has question r and three possible answers like d d and c the content of these elements is not what is important.

I'm pretty sure he just wrote random letters because he knew you weren't going to see them anyway and the reason for this is that he managed to make them huge, so for context, if I inspect a normal Instagram story, I'll find that the values of x and y scale for the size of each one. The sticky element will be between zero and one and means roughly what proportion of the screen that thing will take up for pg talal stories, although the scale of these elements is 18 digits, so we're not talking about stickers big enough to fill . the screen of a single phone, not even hundreds, not even thousands of phones, we are talking about stickers so large that they can span billions and possibly quintillions of phones or in other words, you have taken this quiz and this countdown time is so so big that if we were to actually zoom out and see the full image, it would be many times the size of the Earth.

Do you want to know why the image looks purple on Android? Well, that's because what you're actually seeing is just part of the countdown timer, it's extended. in huge proportions so you're literally looking at a small part of this section here and the confetti is just what Instagram shows when a countdown ends and this also explains why you can't pause it because I'm not actually clicking on the story here I'm just clicking on a non-interactive part of the countdown timer, but how? If I open Instagram I can't continue expanding these elements indefinitely. Instagram's thought on this, well, pj talal has used something called http proxy. which is a type of software that allows you to view, but more importantly, modify the data leaving your phone before it reaches Instagram's servers.

Think of it as a middleman. Talal creates a quick Instagram story with a quiz and a normal-looking countdown. timer on his phone, but then instead of sending that story directly to Instagram and making it public, he intercepted it using this proxy where he then changed the size and location values ​​of these elements to something astronomical and then what we think is happening. This is because Instagram is not built with this scale of numbers in mind, it does not treat them properly. Instagram should have realized that these numbers are stupidly large and filtered them out, they should have had some kind of rule that says if the size is greater than one then make it just one, but they actually went and sent these garbage values ​​directly to your smartphone, so whether or not your device fails in history depends on how well it is able to handle these numbers as a general piece of Android software which is why you can still see a part of this countdown timer , since there isn't a bug, it's not like all Android phones are going to start crashing right away, but overall it's still tiring trying to render.

We discovered something so massive, which is why older and less powerful Android phones still have problems, but iOS as a whole is simply not ready to receive numbers of this magnitude, it does not know how to display these objects and that is why all iPhones, regardless of how powerful they are. it crashes, that's why you don't see anything purple, you don't see any confetti and instead you just see the original gray video with the title in Arabic, that's when android phones are still there but it's behind this timer purple countdown, so the crash is something to do with power and RAM, as I initially assumed, but it also has to do with the software and it's mainly Instagram's fault, but why did Talal do this good?

My best guess is that it's a bit of fun, a challenge, but also Facebook, the owner of Instagram, has a whole list of programmers who actually got paid money because they managed to find vulnerabilities and then report them. I don't think this person is trying to break anyone's phone because Well, firstly, all my phones that were locked because of this I managed to get them back and secondly, the plot twist yesterday, the guy himself replied to me from his personal account and apparently he is only 14 years old. He is a self-taught developer who started out. at the age of 11.

And I think it's funny that he managed to get past all of Instagram's security and I also think he might have hacked into Instagram chat because I swear you're welcome is not a reaction option okay with all that. By the way, there was one thing left to do. We now know that it is possible to lock someone's phone through an Instagram story. We think we know how it's done. Can we recreate it? Yes and no. We managed to use an http proxy to intercept the message. In the story, we managed to enlarge these stickers to ridiculous dimensions, just like Talal did.

Here you can see that we've created a story that, like yours, looks purple on Android, but you can't see that purple on iOS because the iPhone does. It doesn't show the countdown, but it seems like Instagram has fixed the problem because both phones survive. Talal stories will still crash your phone but it doesn't look like you can create a new one now that does the same thing, however there will always be Another exploit, this talal just a couple of days ago posted a new story that used a completely different trick, a sequence of characters that your phone simplyHe doesn't understand how to block Instagram, it's not that serious, it doesn't block everything. phone, but it's still a little crazy to see that you literally can't open the story because the moment you try, the app closes and this crashes.

Annan and I were able to recreate Annaney built a story literally 20 minutes later using the same technique and, of course, Instagram. The bottom line of all this is that no software will be completely airtight because there will always be an exception that the company didn't plan for and this leads to some fascinating questions like what would happen if someone created a bug and then? I paid for ads to have that error shared on each person's device. Could Instagram be held for ransom anyway? Please consider subscribing if you enjoyed it. Thanks again to Annanei for her help on this and if you want to check out my latest video on crazy inventions.

Up here and if you want to see the wallpaper that could kill people's phones, it's here. My name is Aaron. This is.