These days a WhatsApp message has gone viral that can potentially block your mobile. The first thing we have done is test it -by science- without absolutely nothing happening. However, we have found another message that can block your WhatsApp.
Forget about wa.me/settings, the real message that blocks WhatsApp is another. can do that WhatsApp stop responding for a few seconds and overheat the mobile. We tell you what the message is, why this happens, how to prevent it from happening to you, and how to fix it if it has already happened to you.
New WhatsApp “bomb message”
The oldest of the place will remember the black circle of WhatsApp, a message with special characters that made WhatsApp faint, especially on mobiles with low power. Five years later it has a successor in the form of a link that, if you open it, will block or at least slow down your WhatsApp.
After the “disappointment” that wa.me/settings It doesn’t really do anything except ask you to update WhatsApp, we’ve spent time trying other combinations until we find a link that will actually block WhatsApp, and we’ve found it. The message is wa.me/channel.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice for science
The message by itself does nothing, but the problem happens when i open it, when we will notice that something is wrong. WhatsApp begins to slow down a bit, the mobile itself becomes erratic and it can be difficult for us to change the app. In plain words: the app “is roasted”. The tighter your power mobile goes, the more you will notice it.
Why is this happening? It’s not that it’s a malicious message, but it’s a message that WhatsApp isn’t ready to process yet, so the app goes into an error loop until Android finally ends up closing the process. This is quite visible in what happens in Android’s LogCat after opening the link, with a flurry of looping messages:
WhatsApp tries to open a channel link but without the channel name in the link and with a feature that is not yet active for users, the app enter an endless loop which makes the system go slower and slower.
Android waits patiently to see if the system ends up recovering but when WhatsApp exceeds the grace time, it officially receives the ANR (application not responding) status. In the past, Android showed us these errors with a warning, but in the most recent versions it simply the app closes without further ado. It is still visible in the system registry.
Extract from LogCat of the system where Android kills the process due to excessive CPU usage
From the user’s side, what happens when opening this message is that the mobile in general and WhatsApp in particular slow down until it can be blocked, with a possible overheating of the mobile having high CPU usage.
What can you do when faced with this message?
If someone sends you this or any other suspicious WhatsApp message, the best thing you can do is ignore it and don’t open it. The message will not do anything on its own by being displayed on your mobile or having it in a chat: the problem appears when you tap on it in WhatsApp and open it.
If curiosity has been able to you and you have opened the link and now your mobile and your WhatsApp are going badly, don’t panic because it is something temporary that will be solved as soon as you force WhatsApp to close. To do this, you can choose to delete it from the recent window or enter the information view of the app and press Force closing.
If the system is bad enough and it is difficult for you to move through the menus to close WhatsApp, then restart the mobile by any of the available methods: if it can be by good means, the better; if not, the hard way by holding the power button until it turns off. When you turn on the mobile again, the problem will be solved and all you have to do is not open said link again.
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