Android phones have a bug that stops them calling the police, Google warns
The issue is ‘limited’ and an update to Microsoft Teams is coming ‘soon’, Google wrote in a post
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Your support makes all the difference.Some Android users have been unable to call the emergency services in the United States due to a bug in Google’s code.
“I got off a phone call with my mom, and proceeded to dial 911 just by typing and calling on my pixel”, one Reddit user who was using a Pixel 3 wrote.
“My phone got stuck immediately after one ring and I was unable to do anything other than click through apps with an emergency phone call running in the background. This is all while the phone informed me that it had sent my location to emergency services.”
In a reply to the post, an official Google account said that it was able to replicate the issue.
“We believe the issue is only present on a small number of devices with the Microsoft Teams app installed when the user is not logged in, and we are currently only aware of one user report related to the occurrence of this bug. We determined that the issue was being caused by unintended interaction between the Microsoft Teams app and the underlying Android operating system”
The company says that they expect a Microsoft Teams update to be rolled out “soon”, and recommends signing into Microsoft Teams in the meantime, or uninstalling and reinstalling the app.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent before time of publication about how the app could be affecting core Android systems, or a timeframe of when a fix is to be expected.
This is not the only time recently that a third-party app has had significant effects on core Android systems. Last month, the augmented reality game Pikmin Bloom, developed by Pokémon Go team Niantic, delayed SMS notifications while the app was installed. Notifications were only delivered when users force-stopped the application.
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