OnePlus Explains the Cause of the 911 Bug on the OnePlus 5

We may earn a commission for purchases made using our links.

Exactly one week ago we started seeing reports about a OnePlus 5 owner who had attempted to place a 911 emergency call, but was unable to due to a bug. Right when the person tried to call emergency services (to report a building fire), the OnePlus 5 simply rebooted. They attempted this two times in a row and the forced reboot happened both times they tried to call. This is a very dangerous bug to have on your phones as sometimes you’re only able to attempt to call one time if you’re in danger.

OnePlus was made aware of the issue and immediately started working on a fix. Two days later the team reported that the issue was found and a hotfix update was being pushed out to devices at that time. OnePlus 5 owners could wait for the OTA update notification to be pushed to their devices, or they could manually check to see if they were eligible. Because sadly, this was an incremental update and only a small number of people received the update on the first day.

The hotfix update seems to have reached most, if not all, of those who own the OnePlus 5 now and the company has started to talk about the issue at hand. In a new forum thread published earlier today, OnePlus says the issue here was “related to a modem memory usage issue.” The company says this bug was a “random occurrence” for some customers who were on a VoLTE network. And the reboot seems to have only happened when the OTDOA protocol was triggered during an emergency call.

OnePlus worked directly with Qualcomm to fix the issue since it was related to the modem (which Qualcomm provides). Incidentally, over the last week we have also seen reports from other people on Reddit about their phones (from multiple OEMs) experiencing similar issues when they tried to dial 911.