One of lime and one of sand. If less than an hour ago we told you about a new feature coming soon to WhatsApp, now we have to talk about the Meta instant messaging service again, although in this case, it’s to alert you, if you’re an Android user, of a technical issue which will affect the service client for this operating system and that the application may fail, and for this to happen, just try to open the link.

The link in question which if it appears in any of your WhatsApp conversations you should not try to open is http://wa.me/settings and if you click on it, the Android app (doesn’t affect iOS clients or the web version) will crash and force a restartand maybe in some cases to restart the device it’s being used on besides permanently block access to this conversation to all participants in it. But don’t worry, there’s an easy fix (or solution actually).

Before moving on to the steps to follow if you accidentally received this link and clicked on it, you must first clarify that This is not a vulnerability or malicious link (even if it is sent with the intention of being funny). We are facing an error in the WhatsApp client for Android, because this link should actually go directly to the configuration of the application, but due to some problem in the code, it is causing this error.

We have two options to solve the problem. The first consists of access this conversation from another non-Android device (like an iPhone), or from the WhatsApp web interface (we have to login to them first, yes) and delete the message that contains the URL from there.

Another system that seems to have worked for some users is activate airplane mode on the device, then go to WhatsApp and still in offline mode, proceed to delete the message with the link. Then we can reactivate the device’s connectivity and use WhatsApp normally again.

Now that this issue has been published, it’s likely that all kinds of open groups will be filled with “funny” people dedicated to sharing this link, so it’s best to pay even more attention than usual in these types of environments. However, the fact that the link is displayed in the conversation is not the problem, it is necessary to try to open it in order to reproduce the error. WhatsApp has not released any information about this at the moment, but since this is reaching a huge expansion, we can hope that they are already at work and will fix it in the short term.