Here’s another digital prank on the rave right now. There’s a bug on the Apple iOS devices which would brick your iPhone or iPad if you back set your date to anything earlier than May 1970.
Why Setting Date To 01/01/1970 Will Brick Your iPhone
The bug only seems to affect iOS devices, hence the most popular, and most probable, theory by far is one that suggests a bug in the UNIX core of iOS. The theory is that since UNIX measures time from January 1st, 1970, setting the date to that value when in a different time zone might cause the date value to go below zero. Since UNIX, and by extension, iOS, can’t
read a negative date, the device will get stuck.
How To Restore a Bricked Phone
So far, the only reliable way to recover the device IS to either go to an Apple Certified service centre and have the battery removed and reinstalled. You can try to reinstall the battery yourself, but you must be careful not to damage the TouchID sensor. Another less reliable option is to turn off the device and wait for a few hours.
Every device running 64-bit iOS is affected but luckily, a simple software update should fix it.
