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Is your Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL suffering random reboots? Google is working on a fix (Updated)
Update (11/28) at 16:53: Orrin, a community manager in the Google Product Forums, chimed in with an official response.
Thanks for all the info you have provided and for those that sent over bug reports. We want to let you all know that we’ve identified a fix which will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
Original article (11/28) at 05:34: Oh dear. Just when it seemed that the endless stream of Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL issues had come to an end, yet another headache has emerged for Google. This time users are reporting that their brand new phones are rebooting at random.
Technically this is an old issue that has been plaguing some devices since launch. XDA-Developers and Google Pixel product forum posts describing intermittent reboots date back to late October.
Those affected appear to have tried everything from wiping their phones with a factory reset and checking for any malicious third-party apps in Safe Mode. One user even reset their device, chose to not install any apps, made as few changes as feasibly possible to the standard set-up and still encountered the problem while casually typing out an email.
Thanks to the detective work of user Nader Babbili, however, we now know that the likely culprit is nasty bug residing in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL’s LTE modem.
Babbili guessed this might be the case after noticing that reboots only tend to occur when entering a low signal area where LTE signal is patchy. After switching the preferred network type to 3G only, the user found that the reboots stopped entirely.
Not content with his work, Babbili apparently gained access to a local Wilson Cell Amplifier and found that turning it off also stemmed the tide of reboots, even with LTE active on the phone.
It’s unclear what exactly causes the Pixel 2’s modem meltdown, but we do know that Google hasn’t yet fixed the issue. Users running Android 8.1 Oreo are still reporting that reboots happen randomly after the update, as did several users who received replacement devices.
Hopefully a speedy software update can fix the issue once and for all as completely disabling LTE permanently is far from an acceptable solution. In the meantime, let us know if you’ve encountered reboots on your Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL devices in the comments.