There was a mysterious batch of incidents in my school the other day, all involving people’s iPhones. I don’t know who had started it, but once it got going, it seemed that nearly everyone with the ubiquitous Apple device was getting involved. (I happen to have an Android smartphone so I remained unaffected—I may find it harder to get cases or apps for it, but in this case it was helpful.) Someone would send a friend a text—and then the friend’s iPhone would abruptly crash. There didn’t seem to be any irrevocable damage (no need to rush the phone to the Apple Emergency Room), but the phone would abruptly freeze and reboot; the Apple logo that signifies that the phone is booting up would take over the screen, regardless of what the victim had been doing with the phone.

How was this feat accomplished? Rest assured that my friends are not master hackers. (At least, as far as I know; for all I know, however, they could be going through my email as I speak—maybe that explains all of the “free vacations to Bermuda” that I’ve inexplicably been signed up for.) Original explanations varied; some thought the text tried to activate a blocked app, while others wondered if it was a way for ISIS to install a tracker on their phone. According to The Guardian, the iPhone attacks were accomplished by sending a text containing unusual Unicode characters, including Arabic. While the phone could theoretically display the message, the iPhone’s notification banner—the bar that pops in when you receive a text, when you’re outside of the messaging app—cannot display the Unicode characters properly, and when it tries to show it, the phone becomes overwhelmed and crashes. (It seemed that this glitch had been discovered elsewhere in the country and went viral.)

So the “texting bomb,” as I thought of it, ricocheted back and forth between many of my peers throughout the rest of the day. Someone would be trying to watch a YouTube video and then be interrupted by the Apple logo. Others kept on sending it every time their friend regained control of their phone after being on the receiving end. As far as I could tell, it was all in fun; people were using the glitch as a seemingly harmless prank. One student did have trouble opening her messages app afterwards, as a result of the glitch, but later on managed to figure out how to get it working and then deleted the offending text.

So no harm, no foul? Apple claimed (according to text bomb Engadget) that it would fix the problem as soon as possible, and eventually it seemed that it was getting boring to terrorize your friend’s phone. It didn’t seem like anyone’s phones or friendships had been damaged, and I don’t think that there will be any repercussions in this case. The implications, however, bother me a bit.

This type of glitch is a rarity, but it clearly existed and someone somewhere figured out how to exploit it. Being able to crash someone’s phone momentarily isn’t so bad—but it could be harmful when used in a nefarious way. What if someone, for instance, is working on an email that is crucial to him getting a promotion at the company, and is about to click send—and then is interrupted by a phone crash? Suddenly it’s highly likely that he’s lost his work and will have to write the whole thing over, through no fault of his own. (On the flip side, I could see the glitch being a cool part of a spy movie where the hero uses it to interrupt the villain’s call, when the villain is planning to blow up something with his accomplice.) There’s also a scary possibility that if this vulnerability existed in the iPhone—which usually seems to have pretty secure software—then others could be lurking there as well, some of which could end up causing more damage than a momentarily crashed phone. It’s something to think about.

As for the human side of things, there was also the disturbing possibility that the “text bombing” could have gotten out of hand. Rest assured this did not happen at my school, but I could see what might have potentially happened to make the situation more terrible than just a joke exchanged between friends. What if students got into fights because they were sending each other the Unicode? What if students managed to figure out how to send it to their teachers? What if it kept on interrupting class to the point where no one would be able to learn anything because they’d be so distracted by the “texting bomb”? (Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad, personally, but I can understand how that’s not ideal.) What started as a joke could’ve become something serious.

I’ll admit I found the “texting bomb” pretty funny, but taking a step back, I can glean a few more serious messages from the whole incident. Our technology isn’t infallible, as much as we may like to believe it is. We need to be ready for when it fails us and when we discover a vulnerability that has yet to be fixed. And while we should enjoy the jokes we share between ourselves, we should be sure that they don’t get out of hand. That didn’t happen in this case, fortunately, but we need to be aware of the potential for that to happen. Now, I should save this article to my computer and send it in—wait, why’d that Windows logo suddenly appear on the screen? I think I see some Unicode characters on the top…

Oren Oppenheim, age 17, is a junior at Ramaz Upper School in Manhattan and lives in Fair Lawn, NJ. He spends his free time writing and reading, and hopes to become a published novelist, but currently is drowning in emails from colleges. You can email him at [email protected] and see his photography at facebook.com/orenphotography.

By Oren Oppenheim