Apple iPhone users recently experienced a bug on Facebook's Messenger app that annoyed most of them enough to talk about it on Twitter. The bug does not exactly prevent them from sending messages; they just cannot type messages that have more than two or three words.
Facebook claimed to have fixed the bug already, but not before iPhone users affected by the bug took to Twitter to express their frustration. According to them, the Messenger app lets them type one to three words, but then freezes the iPhone keyboard when they try to type longer messages. They checked that the other apps are working well with the iOS keyboard, so they realized that the problem was isolated in Messenger itself.
Users even tried restarting the app and their phones, but the problem still persisted. Others resorted to uninstalling the Messenger app to re-download and reinstall it, but these actions still did not fix the issue.
Seeing that they had no other choice, they resorted to using the app as it is. The resulting messages were sentences broken into very short parts, as seen in a Twitter screenshot by user Brian's Book Blog. Attempting to type more than just a few words per chat bubble resulted in an instant freeze of the iOS keyboard.
As of Wednesday, Facebook claimed that they have fixed the bug. They said on their report that only "a very small number" of iPhone users were affected when they investigated the issue.
Facebook's Messenger app is currently one of the most popular and widely-used messaging apps internationally. It has an estimated one billion users worldwide. Most of its rapid growth was because personal Facebook accounts are automatically tied to a Messenger accounts. Pages of businesses and other services are tied to a unique Messenger account, as well.
However, developers of the app are concerned about its app bloat. They said that there are plans of de-cluttering the service some time later this year.
