Changing the date could permanently brick your iPhone

There have been a few serious iPhone issues discovered recently. Some phones got bricked by the iOS 9 Slide to Upgrade bug, there was a website that instantly crashed browsers and rebooted iPhones, and -- most recently -- Error 53 bricked devices repaired by non-Apple technicians.

Now a new iPhone-bricking bug has reportedly been discovered. And I say reportedly, because I’m certainly not about to try it.

According to a post on Reddit (and backed up by some reports in China), setting your device back to a particular date and time will brick it.

Now here comes the warning. It should go without saying, but trying this yourself will in all likelihood brick your device, and we wouldn’t want that. If you really want to do it, go ahead, but we really, really would advise against it. Obviously.

The bug, which only affects 64-bit Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, rears its head when you set the date to January 1, 1970 (aka the Unix epoch). You do this by going to Settings > General > Date & Time and toggling off the option to set the date and time automatically. Scroll back to 2000, go back into Date & Time settings and repeat the process until you hit 1970.

Once you’re at the date, reboot your iPhone and it will (probably) die a sad and lonely death.

According to the reports, neither putting the phone into DFU mode nor restoring it from a backup fixes the problem. Although disconnecting the battery and reconnecting it, or letting it drain down fully might (again, we haven’t tested it).

Some people have reported that they’ve tried this and their phones have emerged unscathed.

A Reddit user speculates this might be down to time zones. He says:

For those who got away with trying this and it not bricking your device, there's a reason why -- time zones.

In some time zones, setting the date to 1 Jan 1970 will set the internal clock to a number less than zero, as the time is stored in GMT (as the number of seconds since midnight on that date) and then the offset is applied before display. In other time zones, setting the clock will result in a positive time value. Best guess is that this is triggered by having the time value less than zero.

Obviously this isn’t really a bug to worry about -- if you don’t ever set your device back to that date then nothing will happen. But maybe make sure you have a passcode or Touch ID set on your phone, to prevent malicious pranksters testing out this trick while your back is turned.

Photo Credit: iQoncept/Shutterstock