‘0 Day bug’ hits WhatsApp Beta version on Android

If you are a beta tester of WhatsApp, then you may have noticed this bug in the latest beta update for the app. With the WhatsApp update version 2.18.109, it is the case of the latter. Due to a mysterious bug, the timestamp on the chat window of users is appearing with numbers. For instance, instead of ‘Today’, messages which are exchanged on that day are appearing with “84oday”; instead of ‘Yesterday’ the timestamp is shown as “89esterday” for messages which are exchanged a day before.

According to a report on WABetaInfo, a Twitter account that tracks changes in WhatsApp’s beta builds, the issue is impacting only the day stamp. A Twitter user pointed out that this may be happening because WhatsApp is picking the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) code of the first letter of the timestamp. As of now, WhatsApp has not revealed the reason behind this. It has been estimated that maybe it is picking up the ASCII code of the first two letters. Well, whatever be the reason, it is expected that this bug will be fixed before it is sent out to a majority of users.