Irony! Apple iPhone 5s Users Face the Blue Screen of Death

Owners of the new iPhone 5s are having a problem that brings to mind the frustrations of millions of PC users in the 90s: The dreaded "Blue Screen of Death."

According to the Verge, the error, which mirrors a problem, which used to occur with old computers running bygone versions of Windows OS (mostly), is cropping up for users of the latest top-level iPhone, which runs iOS 7.

Just like the Blue Screen of Death of old - which was so well known that it many veterans of PC frustration recognize its abbreviation, BSOD - Apple iPhone 5s devices are randomly restarting after flashing a blue screen.

The error mostly seems to occur when users are trying to multitask while using Apple's version of Office, iWork. However, some users are saying that the BSOD error is occurring outside of iWork.

One of the earliest reports comes from Mac Rumors' forums, where as far back as Sept. 21, just a day after the iPhone 5s's release date. User "bigjnyc" told the forums, "So I got my iPhone 5s yesterday and set everything up when I got home. I started playing around with it and all of a sudden the screen blue and the [sic] the phone rebooted. I thought maybe this was just a one-off issue and thought nothing of it."

But it wasn't. "Bigjnyc" continues, "the issue kept happening. I noticed that it happened whenever I was using either the ESPN Scorecenter or Numbers apps. Very bizzare I thought so I recorded a video of this happening and headed to the Apple store. Of course I couldn't reproduce the problem in front of the genius but the video helped and they gave me a brand new replacement.... I backed up from my iCloud and stayed in the store for nearly an hour playing around with the phone. Later on while doing some shopping I open numbers and there it goes again!"

He posted this video of his iPhone 5s quitting on him:

Other users on Apple's help forums have similar complaints, related specifically to Apple's iWork app, which comes with the phone.

Other Apple users have noticed the error happens reliably when using the Numbers and Pages apps within iWork, especially when exiting or trying to open, save or share documents that have been saved to iCloud. Multitasking any of these functions together seems to be the predominant cause of the BSOD.

But other Apple apps also have been reported to cause the error. Apple user Caspian333 noted, "This is happening to me when using facetime, safari, the camera and assortment of other apps. I tired restoring my phone and deleting every non apple app. My phone has started crashing every few hours and sometimes takes as long as 30 minutes to cycle between the blue screen and apple logo."

This is not the first time Apple has had software errors that were common enough to earn the internet's "Of Death" suffix. Early version of Apple OS X would freeze while performing processor-intensive activity, resulting in Apple's multicolored processing icon appearing indefinitely. Users called it the "Spinning Beach Ball of Death" (SBBOD), which can actually be quite beautiful when made into an art video: