Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica
have you seen that movie ring? Anyone who watches the cursed and spooky video mysteriously dies within 7 days. For some reason Google seems to have recreated that tech version. The creepy video is this clip from his 1979 film. alien, It’s the Google Pixel phone that dies after watching it.
As pointed out by user “OGPixel5” on the Google Pixel subreddit, watching this particular clip on a Google Pixel 6, 6a, or Pixel 7 causes the phone to reboot immediately. – Crashes before loading frames Some users in the thread are saying that the cell service doesn’t work after a reboot and needs to be rebooted again to get it running.
The main theory floating around is that something about the format of the video (4K HDR) is causing the phone to crash – it’s not the first time something like this has happened to an Android phone. In 2020 there was a cursed wallpaper that crashed the phone when set as background due to a color space bug. All affected phones use Google’s Exynos-derived Tensor SoCs, so don’t expect non-Google phones to be affected by this. A Samsung Exynos phone could be the next strong contender, but there have been no reports of such.
This bug was first posted over the weekend and seems to have been fixed. It looks like Google changed something, as my Pixel 7 Pro crashed shortly after yesterday and I was able to confirm that it plays clips just fine today. I haven’t found anything obvious like app updates yet, but Google has a lot of things to remotely change the behavior of the phone, like the ability to disable or enable code paths without pushing updates. There is a trick. Several users on the Pixel subreddit reported that their videos still work fine today.
