Since I added the following code, every time my app opens this UITableViewController it crashes:
self.noArticlesView = [[UIView alloc] init];
Checkout "Auto Layout still required after executing -layoutSubviews" with UITableViewCell subclass as the question appears to be the same.
I was able to implement the category mentioned in one of the answers which solved the problem for me. However, I had to create the category on the UITableView class instead of the UITableViewCell class as is discussed in that particular answer.