The Vice Motherboard talks about a case with the Google Pixel 3 user, which could not call 911 due to a bug.
The man known online as KitchenPicture5849 revealed on Reddit that he was unable to call 911 when his grandmother had a stroke.
On Friday, I had to call an ambulance for my grandmother because she had a stroke. My phone froze right after one call and I couldn’t do anything but browse the apps while an emergency call was being made in the background. All the while, the phone kept telling me that it had relayed my location to the emergency services. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell the person on the other end of the line which apartment I was in and what happened, since I couldn’t talk to the person at all.says KitchenPicture5849.
Fortunately, KitchenPicture5849’s grandmother’s apartment had a landline phone, so the user still managed to call an ambulance. But then he wondered what happened to his device.
Hopefully someone from Google will let me know that they are already solving this problem. Because let’s be serious, as someone without a landline phone, I definitely don’t want my smartphone to go crazy when I try to call 911 in the midst of a life-threatening emergency. I have to be sure that the smartphone will do what it was created for: it will call and allow me to talk to the person on the other end of the line.the victim writes.
KitchenPicture5849 later tried to reproduce the error again and found that it still could not call 911. The device still reported that it had contacted emergency services, but there was no evidence that the call was made. The call to 911 was absent in the call logs and in a separate log maintained by the communication provider (in this case, Verizon). The victim writes that he eventually contacted Google and planned to file a complaint with the FCC.
More than a week later, Google representatives responded to a user on Reddit and explained what had happened. It turned out that Microsoft Teams was to blame.
Based on the results of our research, we were able to reproduce the problem under certain conditions. We believe that the problem is present only on a small number of devices with Microsoft Teams installed, [and only appears] if the user is not signed in. Currently, we have received only one custom report associated with this error. We take these issues very seriously and would like to thank KitchenPicture5849 for bringing this issue to our attention.the company representatives write.
It is reported that currently Google and Microsoft are working on a solution to the resulting bug and assure that the removal of Microsoft Teams or ensuring a permanent login will work as a temporary solution.
I'm writer and content manager (a short time ago completed a bachelor degree in Marketing from the Gustavus Adolphus College). For now, I have a deep drive to study cyber security.
