I destroyed my phone in my sleep — what's your most embarrassing tech fail?

Most of us have a tale of breaking or losing a phone that brings us pangs of regret. For example, when I was a teen, I walked into the sea with a phone in my pocket. That was the end of that device, but at least I had the naivety of youth to blame. However, I destroyed my phone in my sleep recently, and the only way I’m going to feel less of an idiot is by hearing your embarrassing tech fails.

It wasn’t my finest hour, but if it will encourage you to fess up, I’ll share my cringe-worthy episode.

I didn’t even know where my phone was when I woke up, much less that I destroyed it. I’d had it when I went to sleep, but it wasn’t on the bedside table in the morning. I checked the usual places, then the places I knew it couldn’t possibly be, just in case. No sign of it.

I was stumped. Find Hub showed it last pinged in the vicinity of my department, which was both reassuring and deeply unhelpful. I wasn’t drunk the night before, and there was no one else in the apartment. There was one other possibility so stupid that I initially rejected it on principle, but I had to face it.

I can be quite an active sleeper, and picking up my phone in a near-unconscious state isn’t unheard of. I had also decided to combat the heat the night before by sleeping on the opposite side of my bed to usual, which is next to the open window. I realized I must have picked up my phone in my sleep and put it back down into thin air, blissfully unaware of the phone-icide I just committed.

The window faces into a communal area of the building complex, so if I had defenestrated my device, I wasn’t immediately concerned that a passerby would have stolen it. I was much more preoccupied with the fact that I live on the 11th floor. This felt more relevant, as the communal area is ten floors below and has a paved surface.

I went to the lobby and asked security if anyone had handed in a phone. They had, and I got my Galaxy S24 Plus back, but it wasn’t in good shape. Despite having a pretty tough case and a screen protector on it — both of which survived the fall intact — the phone looked like it had been volunteered for the JerryRigEverything bend test. It was cracked down the middle and visibly bent. Pressing the power button triggered a flicker of light, as if it were briefly considering whether life was worth continuing before deciding it absolutely was not.

Now it’s your turn. I really want to hear your moments of madness with your devices, so I can feel better about how I destroyed my phone. Let me know in the comments below, and vote in the poll above to see the results. Maybe you’ll just tell me how stupid I was, but let he without sin cast the first stone. Or, in my case, throw the first phone.

Some related questions you might prefer to answer:

• What’s the most expensive piece of tech you’ve accidentally lost or destroyed?
• Have you ever broken something and only realized later how it happened?
• Have you ever destroyed a device through sheer bad luck rather than carelessness?
• Do you have to buy a cheap new phone fairly regularly due to your mishaps?