After the discovery of a serious FaceTime that allowed users to listen and / or see other people before a call was answered, Apple quickly turned off its server service as a temporary solution to prevent the problem from spreading.
As a result, it is no longer possible to add your personal phone number to a FaceTime group call, which until then appears to be the main cause of the bug. In our tests, we confirmed that FaceTime group calls are in fact unavailable; Direct connections between two people are working normally.
If the seriousness of this failure were not enough, a user seems to have reported the problem to Apple on January 20, as disclosed by Mark Gurman (from Bloomberg) – that is, it was possible to reproduce the problem at least nine days ago.
This Twitter user claims to have reported the FaceTime bug to Apple around January 20th. https://t.co/6y2HErSYXJ
– Mark Gurman (@markgurman) January 29, 2019
This Twitter user claims to have reported the FaceTime bug to Apple around 20 January.
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My teenage son found a major security hole in Apple’s new iOS. He can listen to your iPhone / iPad without your approval. I have a video. Bug report sent to @ AppleSupport … waiting to hear back for details. Scary things! #apple #bugreport @foxnews
As we reported, Apple is expected to release an emergency software update today or tomorrow to resolve the issue. As this is not so trivial (multiple tests need to be done before putting updated software in the hands of millions of users), she decided to disable the service remotely on her servers.
And it did right, of course. The question that remains is: what will happen when “iOS 12.1.4” comes out? Will she reactivate FaceTime in a group for everyone, or can she keep it locked only for those with the vulnerable version? We’ll know soon.