The Great Safari Crash Of 2016: What Caused Apple’s Browser To Crash on Macs And iPhones Worldwide?
By the end of Wednesday, Apple announced that it had fixed a problem that caused its Safari web browsers to crash on Macs and iPhones all over the world.
The problem first surfaced earlier in the day with several Mac and iPhone users complaining about a bug that reportedly caused them a great deal of inconvenience while browsing the internet.
Apparently, the browser was crashing every time a user would try carrying out a search using the URL or address bar.
Initially, some analysts thought the glitch could be due to a recent update in Apple's OS X and iOS operating systems.
However, later it was found that even those users who had not previously installed the new updates were also reporting the issue.
This led to the speculations that the root cause of the problem could be traced back to some sort of erroneous process happening at Apple's data center.
However, some also suggested that the issue could have originated due to an additional flaw in Safari itself that made the browser crash repeatedly.
Even though Apple did not come up with an explanation to the root cause of the issue, it took the company some time before a fix could be rolled out to all users.
As per a BBC report, users could speed up the process by first going to Safari's preferences and then clicking on the clear history and website data.
The bug reportedly only affected those whose "suggestion cache" was updated while the phone was still being used between 09:00 GMT and 12:00 GMT on Jan. 27.
As a result of this, more Apple users in Europe fell victim to the glitch than their counterparts from the US or Asia.
In a related news, earlier this week a malicious web link had gone viral that forced Safari to crash frequently.
As it turns out, the malicious web page in question sent the browser into a loop, forcing it to eventually crash.
However, reports can not independently verify any relation between the malicious link and the Safari crash.