New iOS bug disables Wi-Fi forcing users to factory reset their device

According to Mashable, when triggered, the bug disables the Wi-Fi feature on the affected iPhones. Essentially, users won’t be able to activate Wi-Fi or use features like AirDrop.

Now, a more severe variant of the iPhone Wi-Fi bug has been found by an equivalent security researcher who discovered the first bug in June.

The original bug was triggered once a user tried to attach to Wi-Fi networks with the ‘%’ symbol in them off. This is often because, in some programming languages, the text that follows the half symbol is treated as a command rather than just plain text. Thankfully, simply resetting the network settings fixed the first bug.

When trying to replicate this bug on an iPhone 11 with the iOS 14.5.1 update installed. Testers were unable to breed or trigger the bug, so it’s possible that not all iPhones are suffering from this. But until Apple makes a politician acknowledgment, it’s difficult to mention exactly which iPhone-iOS combinations are affected.

However, the new severe variant of the bug is semi-permanent. The severe variant gets triggered when iPhone comes within the range of a Wi-Fi network named ‘%secretclub%power’.

Users don’t even need to connect their iPhone to the present access point, which makes it tons worse than the first bug.

Once triggered, the Wi-Fi on the iPhone gets disabled. Resetting the phone’s network settings doesn’t help, either. A hard factory reset of the iPhone should ideally solve this problem.

As per Mashable, users could also try restoring a previous backup of the iPhone, or create a replacement backup without the network settings then restore it.