Manually setting the date of your iPhone
or iPad to 1 January 1970, or tricking your friends into doing it, will
cause it to get permanently stuck while trying to boot back up if it’s
switched off.
The bug within Apple’s date and time settings within iOS
causes such an issue that users are reporting that the fail-safe
restore techniques using iTunes are not able to repair the problem.
The date bug affects iPhones, iPads and iPod touches with 64-bit
processors running iOS 8 or iOS 9, including the iPhone 5S or newer, the
iPad Air, iPad mini 2 or the 2015 sixth generation iPod touch or newer.
The precise cause of the issue has not been confirmed, although speculation points
to the way iOS stores date and time formats meaning that 1 January 1970
is stored as a value of zero or less than zero, causing every other
process that requires the time stamp to fail.
YouTuber Zach Straley shows what happens when you set the date manually to 1 January 1970.
To actually set the date back that far manually is quite laborious,
requiring lots of scrolling, saving the time and then re-entering the
time and date settings to scroll some more. Users are not likely to do
it by accident, although pranksters have taken to bricking Apple Store demo units.
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But
there is a possibility that a malicious attacker could trick an iOS
device connected to a network set to automatically adjusting its time
settings into setting the date to 1 January 1970 by pretending to be a
time server. A hacker could brick every 64-bit iPhone connected to a
public Wi-Fi network, for instance.
Users curious about the bug have reportedly bricked their devices trying to disprove the reports on Reddit, ending up having to have the iOS devices replaced by Apple. The Guardian suggests that you do not try it.
Jailbroken iPhone users can protect themselves by using several
tweaks that prevent the date being set to 1970. Other users can protect
themselves by not turning their iPhones off, manually setting the time
and date and turning off automatic time changes.
Apple said that it was looking into the bug, later releasing a statement saying:
“Manually changing the date to May 1970 or earlier can prevent your iOS
device from turning on after a restart. An upcoming software update
will prevent this issue from affecting iOS devices. If you have this
issue, contact Apple Support.”
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