A new iOS bug could prevent you from connecting to Wi-Fi networks for good, unless you're fine factory resetting your phone all of a sudden. When triggered, the bug disables the Wi-Fi feature on the affected iPhones. Essentially, you won’t be ready to activate Wi-Fi or use features like AirDrop.

Now, a more severe variant of the iPhone Wi-Fi bug has been found by an equivalent security researcher who discovered the first bug in June.

The original bug was triggered once you tried to attach to Wi-Fi networks with the ‘%’ symbol in them. this is often often often because, in some programming languages, the text that follows the half symbol is treated as a command rather than just plain text. Thankfully, simply resetting the network settings fixed the first bug.

We tried replicating this bug on an iPhone 11 with the iOS 14.5.1 update installed. We were unable to breed or trigger the bug, so it’s possible that not all iPhones are suffering from this. But until Apple makes a politician acknowledgement, it’s difficult to mention exactly which iPhone-iOS combinations are affected.

However, the new severe variant of the bug is semi-permanent. The severe variant gets triggered when your iPhone comes within the range of a Wi-Fi network named ‘%secretclub%power’.

You don’t even need to connect your iPhone to the present access point, which makes it tons worse than the first bug.

Once triggered, the Wi-Fi on your iPhone gets disabled. Resetting the phone’s network settings doesn’t help, either. A hard factory reset of the iPhone should ideally solve this problem. You could also try restoring a previous backup of your iPhone, or create a replacement backup without the network settings then restore it.