Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica
Have you seen this movie before the ring? People who watched a damn scary video died under mysterious circumstances within seven days. Somehow it looks like Google has recreated the tech version of that, which is where the creepy video is This clip From the 1979 movie alien, And the thing that dies after watching it is the Google Pixel phone.
As user “OGPixel5” noted on Google Pixel sub, watching that particular clip on your Google Pixel 6, 6a, or Pixel 7 will cause the phone to restart immediately. Something in the clip just isn’t acceptable to the phone, and it crashes hard before it can even load a frame. Some users in the thread are saying that the cellular service will not work after a restart, requiring another restart to get it back up and running.
The leading theory floating around is that something about the video format (it’s 4K HDR) is causing the phone to crash. This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened to an Android phone. In 2020 there was Cursed wallpaper It would crash the phone when set as wallpaper thanks to a color space bug. All affected phones use a Tensor SoC derived from Google’s Exynos, so don’t expect any non-Google phones to be affected by this. Samsung Exynos phones will be the next most likely candidates, but we haven’t seen any reports of that.
This bug was first posted over the weekend and appears to have been fixed. We can confirm that our Pixel 7 Pro would crash immediately yesterday and was able to play the clip just fine today, so it looks like Google changed something. We didn’t discover anything as obvious as an app update, but Google has plenty of tricks to remotely change how a phone works, like the ability to Disable or enable code paths without paying an update. Several users on the Pixel subreddit have reported that video is working fine today as well.
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