The Instagram Story that Kills Your Phone

Apparently, there is an Instagram user by the username of "pgtalal" (https://www.instagram.com/pgtalal/) that has a story that stops your phone from responding, either Android or IOs.

If we are to look at his Instagram page right now, there is only one story in it. The bio only recites to another page, on which he claims to be a Full Stack Developer and the owner's TikTok account.

A Full Stack Developer is a developer that can configure both the back and front end of software, or both the client and the server, or just about everything that a computer engineer does, depending on the project.

Before the owner even made changes to his account, these are the things that you will see on the page:

• No profile picture, as well as on his other account.

• Three Instagram stories, two of which are titled in the Arabic language, and the other one that says, "Try it". The first video title translates to "Nice thing I passed" and the second one was "Bittersweet thing".

• A compilation video that almost has 2,000,000 views that feature the character of Monica from FRIENDS that has a caption in it, in the Arabic language, that translates to "my personal account pgtalal @0xtalal".

The Instagram story is totally different from when you click it on an iPhone versus an Android phone.

On Android, when you click the story, it opens up a purple background with a caption in it and confetti, with a song called "Your Love" that will play. When you try to pause it using your finger, it won't pause. If you are to use the latest Android phones, the things mentioned above will happen, but on the cheaper and older versions, the phone will crash badly.

On iPhone, it will show up a grey screen with also a caption in it and your phone will just stop running.

So how come an Instagram story crashes your phone?

As an IT Student, it came to my mind that possibly this story features a background or something that you can put on an Instagram story from letters to stickers, that takes up so much of the RAM involve in a phone. The latest iPhone has 6GB of RAM which probably isn't that high enough for the story to be viewed properly, like other Instagram stories.

As I go through articles and video reviews about the certain attack that this Instagram story did, I made a lot of surprising facts about it.

The first one is how much space the story takes. If you look at the stickers that Instagram provides and inspect them using your browser, you will see how much width and height it has, somewhere between 0 and 1. This means that almost most stickers are on decimals that are not that big to fit on your phone. However, on pgtalal's story, it has around 18 digits of numbers. That size can fit into almost the amount of the latest iPhone that has been sold.

So I have mentioned earlier, on the Android phone, you will see confetti, but actually if you "can" zoom it out, the confetti thing is just part of a countdown timer, a sticker on Instagram. If you are an Instagram user, you must be familiar with the countdown timer and when it ends, it shows confetti.

This means that you are only looking at one part of the whole image/s that is on that story. This will also explain why you can't pause it. This is because you're holding into a timer, not on the other part of a story where you can pause it.

But still, how?

If you are an Instagram user, and you use the countdown sticker to your Instagram story, it doesn't stretch up to cover the whole "page" of the phone.

The thing with pgtalal, he used something called "HTTP Proxy" which before he can even send the story to Instagram, allows him to intercept it. He can change the size of the photo to how big he wanted it to be. And because Instagram is not built or programmed to handle that kind of size, it is not responding to the story properly.

All in all, right now, there is still no "real" reason upon how this guy, who is only 14 years old (according to him), came up with this idea on an Instagram story.