For duck's sake Why autocorrect has been playing havoc with iPhones

Don't worry, you're not going mad. If you feel the autocorrect on your iPhone has gone haywire recently - inexplicably correcting words such as "come" to "coke" and "winter" to "w Inter" - then you are in good company.

- Aisha Down

Judging by comments online, hundreds of internet sleuths feel the same way, with some fearing it would never be solved.

Apple released its latest operating system, iOS 26, in September. Just over a month later, conspiracy theories abound and a video purporting to show an iPhone keyboard changing a user's spelling of the word "thumb" to "thjmb" has racked up more than 9m views.

Jan Pedersen, a statistician who did pioneering work on autocorrect for Microsoft, said: "There's a lot of different forms of autocorrect. It's a little hard to know what technology people are actually employing to do their prediction, because it's all kind of underneath the surface."

Kenneth Church, a computational linguist who helped pioneer some of the earliest approaches to autocorrect at AT&T in the 1990s, said: "What Apple does is always a deep, dark secret. And Apple is better at keeping secrets than most companies."