These days, a WhatsApp message has gone viral and can potentially block your mobile. The first thing we did was test it – by science – with absolutely nothing happening. However, we found another message that can block your whatsapp.
Forget that wa.me/settings, the real message that blocks WhatsApp is another. can do that WhatsApp stops responding for a few seconds and overheats the mobile. We tell you what the message is, why it 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”
Older folks in the place will remember WhatsApp’s black circle, a message with special characters that made WhatsApp swoon, especially on low-powered mobiles. Five years later, it has a successor in the form of a link which, if you open it, you block or at least slow down your whatsapp
After the “disappointment” that wa.me/settings It really doesn’t do anything except ask you to update WhatsApp, we spent some time trying other combinations until we found a link that will actually block WhatsApp, and we found it. The message is wa.me/channel.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself for science
The message itself does nothing, but the problem happens when i open it, when we notice that something is wrong. WhatsApp starts to slow down a bit, the mobile itself becomes erratic, and it can be difficult for us to switch apps. In short: the app “is roasted”. The tighter your mobile power is, the more you will notice it.
Why does this happen? 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 enters an error loop until ‘Android ends up closing the process. This is quite visible in what happens in Android’s LogCat after the link is opened, with a burst of looping messages:
WhatsApp is trying 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 increasingly slow.
Android patiently waits to see if the system eventually recovers but when WhatsApp goes past the grace time, it officially receives ANR (app not responding) status. In the past, Android would show us these errors with a warning, but in newer versions, it the application closes immediately. It is still visible in the system registry.
Excerpt from LogCat of system where Android kills process due to excessive CPU usage
On the user 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 to do with this message?
If someone sends you this or any other suspicious WhatsApp message, the best thing to do is to ignore it and don’t open it. The message will not do anything on its own by showing on your mobile or having it in a chat: the problem appears when you tap on it in WhatsApp and open it.
If they send you the message, don’t press it. If you have already opened it, you must close WhatsApp (or restart the mobile) to bring it back to normal
If curiosity could you and you opened the link and now your mobile and whatsapp is bad, don’t panic because it’s something temporary that will be solved as soon as you force close whatsapp. To do this, you can choose to remove it from the recent window or enter the information view of the application and press Force close.
If the system is bad enough and it’s hard for you to move through the menus to close WhatsApp, then restart mobile by one of the available methods: if it can be by good means, the better; otherwise, the hard way by holding down 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 stop opening said link.
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