Source: Dan Thorp-Lancaster / Windows Central
A little over a week ago, reports began to arrive on the Google Pixel subreddit of users being unable to call 911. That is highly alarming for obvious reasons, and the issue thread by u/KitchenPicture5849 quickly gained attention from Google as users, and the Pixel Team itself investigated the issue and tried to pin down the source.
The cause has been located and confirmed by Google, and I’m still tilting my head in utter confusion at it: Microsoft Teams. Somehow, if you have Microsoft Teams installed but aren’t logged into a Teams account — perhaps if you keep it installed to join invited calls from an organization that uses 365 — you might find yourself unable to dial 911. From the official comment by Google:
“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.”
Thankfully, this should impact a very limited number of people, and non-logged-in Microsoft Teams users can uninstall and reinstall the Microsoft Teams app to fix the issue for now. A more permanent fix will be coming in the form of a Microsoft Teams apps update which Google and Microsoft are currently working on. We’ve only heard of issues on Pixels so far, but this bug is due to a bad interaction between the Microsoft Teams app and the core Android OS, so a fix will be coming in the January Android security patch to patch this on the OS side and prevent other apps from potentially causing or abusing this flaw.
Pixel phones are some of the best Android phones, and any kind of flaw that impacts the most basic and essential of smartphone functions is alarming. At least the source and a fix were found quickly.
And can we all agree that this is just bizarre?
