Never, Ever Try to Send Your iPhone Back in Time

Setting your iPhone's date and time to Jan. 1, 1970, will instantly make you experience what life in the '70s was like—because you'll no longer have a cellphone. "I changed the time to January 1st 1970," NBC News quotes one poor iPhone user's complaint to Apple. "I shutdown my phone and restarted it, the result is a bricked iPhone. I've tried restoring, updating, but nothing seems to be working." Wired reports it's a bug that appears to be affecting 64-bit iOS devices, such as the iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and other newer models. Moving an iPhone's date setting back by 46 years isn't something most people would do without some prompting. So, of course, there's been some prompting.

An official-looking promotional image popped up on the 4Chan forum on Thursday before spreading to Facebook and Reddit, Business Insider reports. The image instructs people with iPhones to change the date to Jan. 1, 1970 for a fun "easter egg": a rainbow-colored retro Apple logo when the phone is rebooted. Instead, the phone refuses to start back up and requires either a physical fix or complete replacement. So what's causing this odd bug? "It’s almost certainly related to the same Unix glitch that caused Facebook to wish people a happy 46 years on the service," Wired states. (More iPhone stories.)