Apple found itself embroiled in an international controversy this week after users discovered the iPhone‘s built-in keyboard was suggesting a Palestinian flag emoji when typing the word “Jerusalem.” The tech giant has now moved to address the outrage, stating the emoji suggestion was an unintentional bug that will be fixed in a future software update.

The issue was first brought to widespread attention by British television personality Rachel Riley, who posted about it on X/Twitter on Tuesday. “Showing double standards with respect to Israel is a form of antisemitism,” Riley wrote in a tweet directed at Apple and CEO Tim Cook that has since been viewed over 400,000 times.

When typing “Jerusalem” on the iPhone’s English keyboards for the UK, Singapore and South Africa, a Palestinian flag emoji appeared as a suggested word option, Riley demonstrated. This marked a change from previous behavior, which had suggested the Israeli flag emoji instead for the holy city claimed by both Israel and Palestine.

East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War but viewed by much of the world as Palestinian lands. The competing claims over Jerusalem have been a core issue fueling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades.

“Please explain whether this is an intentional act by your company, or whether you have no control over rogue programmers,” Riley demanded of Apple in her viral tweet, alleging the emoji change amounted to a “double standard” against Israel.

In a statement to iMore on Wednesday, Apple said it was aware of the issue, which it described as an unintentional “bug” or software glitch affecting the predictive emoji suggestion feature. The company vowed to fix the problem in an upcoming release but did not provide specifics on when that would occur or what caused the errant coding in the first place.

The Jerusalem emoji controversy highlighted the complexity tech companies face in developing globally relevant software while avoiding political minefields. Apple’s predictive text and emoji suggestions utilize machine learning to analyze users’ past messages and websites visited to provide tailored word predictions.

Riley suggested more nefarious motivations may be behind the Jerusalem emoji change, tweeting, “In my opinion a multinational company like Apple would not want to admit publicly that this was an intentional act by an employee/employees hence the description ‘bug’ but I hope at least internally those responsible will no longer be working for the company.”

Apple has not responded to those allegations. The company generally refrains from prejudging circumstances around coding issues until concluding thorough internal investigations.