Background
Instagram has been one of the major social media platforms where people are not just connecting with each other but it is also giving birth to many viral stars. Instagram story is one of the features of the app which was introduced 6 years after its launch in 2010. This blog will cover the story of @pgtalal, yes that’s not a spelling error, but an Instagram account that went viral in 2021 that crashed people’s phone through his Instagram story. Was he hacking people? Was he challenging Instagram? Who was behind it? AND the biggest question of all How did he do it? Everything about it will be covered in this blog post, So keep following for the ‘story of pgtalal.’
What exactly happened?
1. As soon as an IOS user viewed this Instagram story, their app would stop working, then crash.
2. Unlike normal Instagram stories this special story could not even be paused.
3. Some users had a different experience, instead of crashing their phone, they saw a purple screen with a confetti (still not able to pause the story). It only crashed iPhone and low end Androids, not because iPhone are bad, rather ios didn’t know how to render the story.
Harmful or Harmless?
So was it harmless? Yes, to this date all phones were able to recover even those phones that tried opening the story. After reaching out the owner, a youtuber(@mrwhosetheboss) was able to uncover the person behind it and the purpose behind it.
Man behind it
This story was posted on the account @pgtalal, and the anonymous account owner wasn’t trying to hide these stories from the public, if anything he was inviting people to click it. According to @mrwhosetheboss these ‘bugs’ were created just for fun, as none of the phones were harmed.And he guesses, the purpose behind it- rather than challenging a social media giant, it was to just have fun.
Man behind it was just a 14y/o boy (in 2021) whose been coding since he was 11. He didn’t have any ill intentions behind it that’s why people didn’t panic and their phones were safe and they weren’t hacked or destroyed.
Aftermath
He deleted those stories, Instagram fixed its bug and some people claim, the boy bagged a fortune from Instagram for finding out bugs and making the app better. Similarly, Facebook has a whole page dedicated to such users who have made similar ‘responsible disclosures’. These bug hunters are recognized and rewarded every year. Connecting this story to the purpose of our blog, Social Media may have such a scary yet useful impact.
Impact on Social Media and Hacks
The moral of the article is that we use our social platforms to create either an identity or a platform for ourselves and others. And all the information that you store online can easily be hacked or compromised because the problem with social media, or any other internet service for that matter, is that they do not document anything that users should do to keep their phone safe. The main reason for this is that maintaining a platform is the responsibility of developers, not users. And revealing flaws simply exposes oneself to potential hackers.
This is a photo of what users were seeing when clicking on their Instagram stories. They could not view their own stories but instead had an Arabic word displaying on their screen.
This is a photo representing, users who have decided to go public and work with Facebook in order to work on finding and fixing bugs.