OnePlus 5 Owners Plagued By Potentially Deadly Reboot Bug When Trying To Call 911 Emergency Services
Unfortunately, some OnePlus 5 owners are discovering that dialing 911 isn’t giving them a direct line to emergency services. Instead, in some cases, their phones are rebooting shortly after pressing the call button. One reddit user reports that he saw a building fire that was a few blocks away from his position. Naturally, he dialed 911 only to have his phone reboot instead. A video has since been reposted which replicates the problem:
But it’s not just 911 service that’s affected. Users in the UK are also reporting that trying to dial emergency services in that country (999) also results in a reboot.
The problem doesn’t appear to be affecting every single OnePlus 5 owners, but the problem is widespread enough to still be incredibly dangerous. For that reason, OnePlus has come out relatively quickly to state:
We have contacted the customer and are currently looking into the issue. We ask anyone experiencing a similar situation to contact us at support@oneplus.net.
We should mention that this isn’t the first problem to affect new owners of the OnePlus 5. When the first devices were delivered to customers, many reported issues with “Jelly Scrolling”, in which scrolling through webpages would cause an odd visual distortion. Some have said that the problem stems from the fact that the display on the OnePlus 5 is inverted compared to the way it is mounted on most other smartphones. But regardless of the cause, OnePlus basically stated that there is nothing to see here, writing:
The OnePlus 5 uses the same level of high-quality components as all OnePlus devices, including the AMOLED display. We've received feedback from a small number of users saying that at times they notice a subtle visual effect when scrolling. This is natural and there's no variance in screens between devices.
Quickly brushing off an issue regarding scrolling is one thing, but OnePlus is at least wisely realizing that an issue affecting emergency services dialing is an entirely different matter.
