This article was published on January 27, 2016

Safari is crashing on iPhone and Mac because Apple’s search suggestions are down


Safari is crashing on iPhone and Mac because Apple’s search suggestions are down

If you can’t open Safari on your Mac or iPhone today, you’re not alone. A bug that appears to be related to Apple’s search suggestions within both Safari on iOS and OS X is causing the browser to crash or lock up.

It appears to affect all versions of iOS and OS X, and means that you aren’t able to browse the Web at all. Hundreds of comments on Reddit and Twitter suggest the issue is widespread.

The feature is used to offer suggestions for your search as you type a query, to help save time.

Disable Safari Suggestions to fix
Disable Safari Suggestions to fix

The bug manifests in various ways, such as crashing the browser for iPhone users or causing Safari on OS X to lock up when you type in the address bar. It also only appears to affect some users across the world, but not everyone.

There’s only one way to fix the issue right now, which is heading into settings on your iPhone, then Safari and disabling ‘Search Engine Suggestions’ temporarily so you can launch the browser again.

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Apple’s status page reports that everything is fine, however.

Update @ 8:00 AM PT: Apple tells us the issue is resolved, but it may take an hour or two for it to work on your device. It didn’t comment on what caused the outage.

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