Have you ever seen this movie “The Ring”? All people who watched the damn creepy video will mysteriously die in seven days. Somehow, Google seems to have recreated a technical version of this, where the creepy video is a clip from the 1979 movie Alien, and the thing that dies after watching it is a Google Pixel phone.
As user “OGPixel5″pointed out on the Google Pixel subreddit, watching this particular clip on a Google Pixel 6, 6a, or Pixel 7 will cause the phone to instantly reboot. Something about this clip is unpleasant for the phone, and it’s difficult. – crashes before it can even load the frame. Some users on the thread are saying that the cellular service won’t work after a reboot, requiring another reboot to get it back up and running.
The main theory going around is that something in the video format (it’s 4K HDR) is causing the phone to crash. This is not the first time this has happened to an Android phone. In 2020, there were cursed wallpapers that caused the phone to crash when set as a background due to a color space error. All affected phones use Google’s Exynos Tensor SoC, so don’t expect non-Google phones to be affected. Samsung Exynos phones will be the next most likely candidates, but we haven’t seen any reports of this.
This bug was first posted over the weekend and looks like it will be fixed. We can confirm that our Pixel 7 Pro crashed instantly yesterday and can play the clip normally today, so it looks like Google has changed something. We haven’t noticed anything obvious, like app updates, but Google has a lot of tricks for remotely changing phone behavior, like the ability to disable or enable code paths without installing an update. Several users on the Pixel subreddit report that the video is working fine today.