There have been a number of reports that opening a message containing a black dot with a hand pointing to it has been causing Apple devices to freeze and crash.



The message contains a string of thousands of invisible characters which overloads the message application. The hidden characters are usually used to to tell the app to perform a process, such as reading text left to right or right to left. 

To solve this issue, delete the message from the device. Further information about how to delete the malicious message can be found by selecting the Apple device affected, and searching “Black dot Emoji message” in the search bar on the UAD.