A Black hole is one of the strangest and most fascinating object found in outer space. Not even electromagnetic radiation such as light can escape its strong force of gravity. The rule is, "Never go too close." Else you get sucked in, Or frozen in. Yes, frozen in. That what the black hole does.
A message has been going round on Whatsapp now, and the Whatsapp team is yet to release any official statement on it. While we wait for that, let me take you through this article that aims to explain what may be the cause for the freezing of the mobile Whatsapp app when you touch the black hole.
We need to understand these words Unicode, bug.
A Bug: is an error in a software code.
Unicode: is a set of universally accepted code for thousands of characters; one unique code for one character. For example, the unicode for the character $ is U+0024. Irrespective of if it is on a computer, a mobile device or any other computer except, of course, in your textbooks, the code remains the same.
The unicode also contains codes for some invisible characters such whitespaces (space, tab, carriage return, line separator etc.), RLM (Right-to-left mark; U+200F. Renders text from right to left, as in when writing Arabic or Hebrew), LRM (left-to-right mark; U+200E. Renders text from left to right, as in when writing English Language), ZWSP(Zero Width Space; U+200B. It is a white space but renders with zero width. Useful for hinting where a line break could go if a browser needs to wrap a long line.)
The black hole you see on that message in your whatsapp is a text rendering bug that is made up of over a thousand invisible characters, say the RLM and the LRM placed side by side with each character having a zero width space.
When you click on texts on whatsapp, the text is automatically highlighted, so you can forward, quote or copy the text. But when you click on this black hole, the whatsapp inbuilt text processor gets confused on how to render the text, if left to right or right to left since thousands of RLM and LRM are place side by side, and the next thing, it gives up trying, then your whatsapp hangs.
Hopefully by the next upgrade of the whatsapp application, the mysterious hole would have been fixed, and you can surf your space without the fear of your whatsapp ship getting sucked into the black hole.
Reference: Tom scott at
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