It seems the recent reported problems with iOS 9.3 and older iPads isn’t the only issue with the latest release.

My wife has an iPhone 6 that was working fine until it suddenly stopped being able to open hyperlinks in Safari and Messages… Oddly when searching in Safari with the browser set to use Google as the default browser none of the returned links worked when tapping on them. The links simply refused to load. Changing the search engine to DuckDuckGo also generated faulty links but when trying Bing the returned result links worked fine !

Further testing with web links sent to Messages had the same result and worse, when I tried long pressing the link to bring up the menu to Copy the link the app ( Safari or Messages ) seemed to hang requiring it to be force quit. My initial search for solutions to this problem were unsuccessful as most of the returned links referred to similar issues reported a couple of years ago in previous iOS releases, so I threw this question out to the Twitterverse for assistance. @theMacFixer helpfully replied advising the only fix currently seemed to be a complete reset of the affected device, so I tried a quick Reset All Settings which didn’t resolve the issue, followed by the more drastic Erase All Content And Settings which did the trick !

Obviously if you are affected by this issue and decide to do a complete Erase make sure you have all your settings and passwords available beforehand as you will need to setup accounts and applications from scratch afterwards ( don’t try restoring old backups because you will most likely just restore the problem ).

Hopefully not too many others are affected by this glitch and Apple get it sorted in the next update