Update: Sony has confirmed that it has fixed the exploit which was causing PlayStation 4 consoles to crash. Replying to twitter user, PlayStation UK's official account wrote – "We've since fixed the issue, and it wasn't bricking consoles, just sending them into a crash loop that can be quickly fixed in under 5 minutes. Delete the message on the PS mobile app, go into Safe Mode, use Option 5, console back to normal." You can read a report of the entire incident below.
Original Report:
It looks like PlayStation 4 owners need to watch out for a message that could reportedly brick their consoles. Numerous PS4 users on Reddit are complaining that their consoles are getting bricked after receiving a message which includes unrecognised characters. According to users, deleting the message using the mobile app isn’t enough. Users will have to rebuild their database by accessing Safe Mode, or factory reset their systems.
Sony hasn’t issued a statement yet, but the company will most likely address the issue by rolling out a software update. However, till the time that happens, users are advised to limiting incoming messages to trusted friends, or turning them off completely. This can be done by visiting the account management section of the console and then changing the privacy settings from there.
The subredditor who posted the message, u/Huntstark also posted a screenshot of the message that was used to brick his/her console. It was also noted the message was sent during a game of Rainbow Six: Siege by a player from the other team who used a dummy account to send the message.
Using messages to exploit certain bugs in the code isn’t something new. Earlier this year, WhatsApp users were getting a message that caused Android and iOS devices to crash. The message said “If you touch the black point then your WhatsApp will hang.” As expected, touching the black dot did cause the app to hang, sometimes also causing the entire phone to crash.
It was noted that the crash was caused due to the inclusion of special characters that are invisible to the user, but were used to change the behaviour of the texts. There were 6000 invisible unicode characters alternating between ‘200E’ and ‘200F’, which are used to indicate left-to-right, and right-to-left writing. WhatsApp couldn’t process that many direction changes as they are all loaded into memory which has a physical limit.