Feb. 2 (UPI) — Apple offered an apology to customers Friday for an iPhone bug that allowed eavesdropping on callers, and said it will issue a fix next week.
The flaw was found last month by Arizona teen Grant Thompson while group chatting with friends with the video calling feature FaceTime. It’s led to at least one lawsuit and forced Facebook to disable its FaceTime feature to investigate.
On Friday, the company apologized for the issue.
“We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week,” Apple wrote.
“We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process. We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix.”
FaceTime is part of the operating system Apple uses on its iPhones and other devices.
Apple said it started working on the problem immediately, but the teen’s family said it tried for nearly nine days to get Apple’s attention, even appealing to CEO Tim Cook via social media.
“It’s exhausting and exasperating,” Michele Thompson said. “It’s very poorly set up, especially for the average citizen. I feel like I went above and beyond.”
