Glitch in Apple's iMessage deletes words 'Obama,' 'surprise'

A strange issue with Apple's iMessage service deletes certain words when they are used at the end of specific sentences, with two cases already found pertaining to the words "Obama" and "surprise".

Using iMessage to send the text "I could be the next Obama " with a trailing space after the last word results in a blank spot where the U.S. president's last name should be, as noted on Friday by The Verge. The same issue applies to the message "The best prize is a surprise ".

When sent from one iPhone to another, the text will show up blank on both users' screens. If the message is sent from a Mac using iMessage, the words "Obama" and "surprise" remain visible in OS X, but are invisible on the iPhone.

The two discovered, affected words appear visible until the "Send" button is hit. And the recipient will see the message in its entirety from their lock screen, only to have the word disappear once the iOS Messages application is opened.

Users can also copy and paste the message in order to see the missing word. It only disappears once it has been sent as an iMessage to another iPhone user.

Apple's OS X platform was affected by a similarly strange bug that would cause most Mac applications to crash by simply entering entering a certain combination of keystrokes. The crash, which was later fixed, could be accomplished by entering "File:///", with an uppercase 'F', into a standard text input space.