Fact behind havocs of whatsapp crashing

“THIS MSG WILL HANG UR WHATSAPP ”. I am sure many of you have got this type of message from your friends and relatives. The interesting fact about this message (for those who didn’t get this message yet) is that it actually hangs your whatsapp and crash it down by giving pop up “Whatsapp has stop responding”.

 There are many form of this message which are circulating in whatsapp virally as people find it interesting when they just click on the message and Boom! as the message stated the whatsapp Application stops responding.

Now as a computer science student curiosity kicks in my head about “How this is working”.

I found this explanation to be easily understandable.

 

Hence I start decoding this and I finally found the working of this spam message.

This whole thing is related to ASCII value and if you don’t know what ASCII values are then for your understanding computers understand binary language i.e. language of 0’s and 1’s and ASCII numbers are standardized decimal number for various type of characters that we use in computer like for example: ‘a’ has an ASCII value of 097.

When you send a text message on whatsapp, the system first breaks down each and every alphabet into ASCII characters. But there’s a limit in the numbers of text (i.e. ASCII values) that you can send via a single message in whatsapp.

Now in this case as you see in above pictures, all this messages have some blank space in them. This blank space consist of such characters that you can’t even see.

Using online converter we can decode the ASCII characters.

I used an converter to decode one of the message i got in my inbox.

As i’ve mentioned above, there’s limit in sending the message(single) on whatsapp. Hence when you send this messages, you’re exceeding the limit. Initially the special characters are hidden, so when you get the text it won’t hang your phone. But when you try to touch the message, whatsapp app won’t be able to read that thus it results sudden whatsapp crash and as a result whatsapp stops responding.

THIS IS HOW THE THING WORKS..

This was my first attempt on decoding a common tech problem.

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