When Apple came out with its revamped iOS 7 last year, it was making a big bet on the re-imagination of its flagship product. The changes were slightly controversial – there were a few bugs in features like iCloud and iMessage, not too mention reports of ‘motion sickness‘ among some users, though on the whole iOS 7 was received positively by fanbois.

However, there was one particular issue that concerned a lot of iPhone users – there’s been numerous reports of the device crashing continually during normal use, which results in the iPhone having to restart for no apparent reason. Apple failed to acknowledge the problem at first, but finally today it revealed that it is aware of the ‘white/black screen of death’ issue and is working feverishly behind the scenes on an update to take care of the problem, reports Mashable.

“We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash,” said Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller.

The ‘white/black screen of death’ takes its name from the legendary ‘blue screen of death’ system failures in Windows. Reason being is that the iOS 7 startup sequence always shows a black or white screen together with the Apple logo.

Mashable goes on to illustrate the extent of the problem in its article, pointing to a huge thread in the Apple Support Communities forum that’s packed with complaints. At the time of writing, the “iPhone 5 with iOS 7 randomly shuts off” topic has more than 250 replies and 89,000 views in total. The majority of posts say that the crashes happen seemingly at random, though a number of posters have said that it seems to happen more frequently when the battery power is below 30 percent.

What’s not clear is when Apple will be ready to roll out its update (or if it’ll actually work), but we’re thinking that it should be sometime soon, what with the iOS 7.1 update on the horizon. Just last Monday, Apple released a fourth iOS 7.1 beta version for developers, though there’s been no mention yet of any rebooting bug fix.