Skip to main content

Filed under:

Samsung's unprecedented recall of the Galaxy Note 7

Samsung has recalled 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 smartphones just a couple of weeks after they went on sale due to safety concerns with the battery. There have been 35 reported cases of phones either exploding or catching fire, and Samsung is recalling all of the units it has produced so far. The company says it has identified a problem with the battery cell and will be rectifying it in the coming weeks. That means that if you've already bought a Note 7, you should probably return it or exchange it when Samsung has released an updated model that's considered safe.

  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 14, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    The Galaxy Note 7 will be banned from all US airline flights

    Brian Green

    Samsung’s recalled Galaxy Note 7 smartphone will be banned from US airline flights. The order comes from the FAA and the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and follows an announcement from earlier this week that Samsung is ending production of the phone entirely. The ban takes effect Saturday at noon eastern time.

    The devices will not be allowed on planes even if they are turned off, a dramatic escalation of the current restrictions which only require that the phones be turned off and not charged or stored in checked luggage.

    Read Article >
  • Nick Statt

    Oct 14, 2016

    Nick Statt

    Samsung expects to lose an additional $3.1 billion due to Note 7 recall

    Samsung says the Galaxy Note 7 discontinuation will cost it another $3.1 billion over the course of the next two fiscal quarters, following a significant reduction in its Q3 earnings guidance. The device, which has a chance of overheating and exploding, has been plagued with problems since its launch back in August. After recalling millions of devices thought to have battery issues, Samsung began issuing replacement Note 7s to customers around the world. However, numerous cases of those replacement units catching fire in the US over the course of the last week prompted Samsung to announce a worldwide recall of all devices and cease production permanently. The company still can't pinpoint the cause of the problem.

    "The company already allocated the expected direct cost from the discontinuation of Galaxy Note7 sales in its third quarter earnings guidance revision announced on October 11th, but expects the drop in revenue from the discontinued sales to continue to have a negative impact on operating profit for the next two quarters," reads Samsung's statement. "The negative impact is estimated in the mid-2 trillion won range for the fourth quarter of 2016 and at approximately 1 trillion won for the first quarter of 2017." At current conversation rates, 3.5 trillion won translates to around $3.1 billion.

    Read Article >
  • Oct 13, 2016

    Angela Chen and Lauren Goode

    The science behind exploding phone batteries

    An exploding phone seems like a freak accident, but the same chemical properties that make batteries work also make them likely to catch fire. Samsung is learning this the hard way, as it becomes the latest company to recall a device — in this case, its new Galaxy Note 7 phone — because the batteries could be dangerous.

    When batteries explode, it’s often the failure of manufacturers to make sure no explosion will happen. Exploding batteries can be the consequence of overeager companies pushing technology to the limit. As our screens gets bigger and phones more powerful, they need more energy, but most of us are unwilling to give up battery life or charging speed.

    Read Article >
  • Jacob Kastrenakes

    Oct 13, 2016

    Jacob Kastrenakes

    Samsung says 23 Note 7s overheated in the past month

    Note 7
    James Bareham / The Verge

    Samsung and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission formally recalled the Note 7 overnight, requesting that every single unit immediately be powered down and returned. That’s 1.9 million phones in total — 1 million of the original Note 7, and 900,000 “replacement” Note 7s — that need to go back.

    To date, Samsung has received 96 reports of overheating phones in the US, with 23 of those coming after the initial recall. But most of those were the original devices. The CPSC says that it’s only looking into six reports of overheating replacement phones right now. Though it’s aware that there might be more.

    Read Article >
  • Rich McCormick

    Oct 13, 2016

    Rich McCormick

    Samsung is reportedly telling S7 owners their phones are safe because the Galaxy is confusing

    Amid its full-scale recall of the Galaxy Note 7, Samsung is reportedly reminding owners of other devices with "7" in the name that their phones are still safe to use. A staff member for tech blog TechnoBuffalo reports receiving a push notification on a Galaxy S7, apparently from Samsung, that specifies that the phone "is not an affected device" and is not subject to recall. It's not yet clear whether Galaxy S7 Edge owners are also receiving these messages, nor whether owners of older Samsung phones are getting them.

    While the S7, the S7 Edge, and the Note 7 are all markedly different phones, the messages may come in handy for people who have heard about the spontaneously combustions and the subsequent recall, but only know they have "a Samsung Galaxy" phone. They may also go some way to repair Samsung's brand reputation among its customers, which is likely to be tarnished by both the company's failure to spot the Note 7 problems before bringing the phone to market, and the failure to fix it once devices were in consumer hands. The company's finances have already taken a hit from the recall — Samsung decreased its expected profits by a third yesterday.

    Read Article >
  • James Vincent

    Oct 13, 2016

    James Vincent

    Samsung is offering Note 7 owners up to $100 credit to return their phones

    The Galaxy Note 7 is officially dead but Samsung is still dealing with the fallout. The company's latest move is to offer financial incentives to US customers who might be unwisely hanging on to their devices.

    Samsung's new Note 7 Refund & Exchange program (which goes live October 13th at 15:00ET) will let customers choose between the following: up to $100 bill credit if they exchange a Note 7 for "any Samsung smartphone," or $25 in credit if they exchange a Note 7 "for a refund or other branded smartphone." (As Samsung makes clear, you get more money for sticking with the company's brand as "a sign of our appreciation for your [...] loyalty.")

    Read Article >
  • Chris Welch

    Oct 12, 2016

    Chris Welch

    Samsung will 'dispose of' recalled Note 7 phones, won't repair or refurbish them

    When Samsung says it's putting an end to the Galaxy Note 7 for good, it's not making any exceptions; the company has confirmed to Motherboard that there are no plans to repair or refurbish a single recalled device. Every Note 7 that Samsung receives back will be scrapped. “We have a process in place to safely dispose of the phones,” a spokesperson said.

    Earlier today, Samsung adjusted its third quarter profit estimates to account for over $2 billion in losses — a direct result of the Note 7 recall saga. But as Motherboard's story explains, the environment will almost certainly pay a more significant cost. Samsung manufactured over 2 million Note 7s, and inefficient smartphone recycling practices make the difficult-to-mine rare earth elements and other components irrecoverable. “These are all very expensive in terms of the environmental impact, but also in the lives they impact to mine them," iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens told Motherboard.

    Read Article >
  • Rich McCormick

    Oct 12, 2016

    Rich McCormick

    Samsung has no idea why the Note 7 keeps catching fire, NYT claims

    As igniting Galaxy Note 7 phones caused house fires, plane delays, and governmental investigations, Samsung engineers faced a different problem — they couldn't get their device to catch fire. Even now — more than a month after the first reports of issues with Note 7 devices surfaced and with the phone out of productionThe New York Times says the company doesn't know why its phones are spontaneously combusting, despite deploying hundreds of employees to work on the problem.

    Read Article >
  • Sam Byford

    Oct 12, 2016

    Sam Byford

    Samsung slashes profit forecast by a third following Galaxy Note 7 debacle

    Samsung issued earnings guidance last week that suggested the calamitous Galaxy Note 7 recall wouldn't have a major impact on the company's bottom line, but the company just released a statement adjusting its forecast significantly. Operating profit for the third quarter of 2016 is now estimated to come in at 5.2 trillion won ($4.6 billion), down 33 percent from the previous figure, while revenue expectations have been slashed by 2 trillion won to 47 trillion ($41.8 billion).

    Earnings of 5.2 trillion won would represent the first year-on-year profit decline for Samsung in a year. The company made 7.39 trillion won in Q3 2015, which was a return to profit growth after two years of decline; the company is now predicting a 30 percent drop on that figure. Last quarter Samsung reported its best profits in over two years on the back of strong Galaxy S7 sales; Samsung hasn't provided details on the adjusted forecast, but it's clear that the company's momentum has seriously slowed.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 11, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Here’s what a smoking Galaxy Note 7 looks like

    After a bunch of fires — something you want to avoid in a smartphone — the Galaxy Note 7 is gone. Everyone can agree that your phone catching fire is a bad thing, but at the moment it’s a bit abstract. All we’ve seen are pictures of phones after they caught fire, so it was a bit tricky to imagine just what was going on to these phones.

    No longer. The Associated Press has video of Dee Decasa’s phone catching fire in her Honolulu home Sunday morning — this is the sixth reported replacement Note 7 to catch fire in the US, if you’re keeping track. In the video, you can see a clearly alarmed Decasa carry a smoking phone into the kitchen and place it down, before apparently fainting.

    Read Article >
  • Jacob Kastrenakes

    Oct 11, 2016

    Jacob Kastrenakes

    Samsung sending out fireproof return boxes for the Note 7

    The Note 7 is prone to bursting into flames, which makes recovering the hundreds of thousands of units that are likely still out there a bit tricky. So Samsung has come up with what's supposed to be a safe solution: a return box that's capable of withstanding extreme heat.

    XDA-Developers reports that Samsung has begun sending out the return kits to customers who have gotten in touch about returning their phone.

    Read Article >
  • Oct 11, 2016

    Vlad Savov

    Samsung's snafu is Google's golden opportunity

    The Galaxy Note 7 was supposed to be a phone good enough for the history books, though Samsung probably didn’t intend for it to land in business and marketing tomes as a teachable moment of what not to do. The Korean company rushed production to beat the new iPhone, encountered a serious hardware defect that caused batteries to catch fire, and then fumbled its way through an inconsistent recall process. Completing the self-harm, Samsung’s replacement Galaxy Notes started self-combusting just as the original ones did, and today the conclusion to this unhappy chapter was written by Samsung killing off its big-time smartphone. But accounting for the damage done by the Note 7 is only just beginning, and it’ll be done under the colossal shadow of Google and its newfound ambitions as a phone maker.

    At the time of the new Galaxy Note’s arrival this summer, Samsung was a company on a roll. It had wowed both critics and the public with the Galaxy S6, S7, and their Edge counterparts, and it had delivered arguably the best smartwatch experience with the Gear S2. As hardware manufacturers go, it’s hard to imagine anyone having as good and consistent a couple of years in public perception as Samsung was enjoying from late 2014 until now. But that was always Samsung’s greatest vulnerability: being just a hardware manufacturer.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 11, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Burned Galaxy Note 7 from Southwest flight seized by federal regulators for testing

    Brian Green

    Investigators with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) used a subpoena to seize the charred remains of Brian Green’s Samsung Galaxy Note 7, the phone that caught fire on a Southwest Airlines flight on October 5th. The investigatory team then drove the device to Bethesda, Maryland and hand-delivered it to the CPSC lab there for extensive testing.

    Green told The Verge that the CPSC confiscated his device with a subpoena on October 6th, the day after the fire, while it was in the hands of the Louisville Fire Department. He said the CPSC apologized for that action as generally the agency prefers to get permission before taking possession of a device, but investigators were not able to get in touch with Green as quickly as they’d have liked.

    Read Article >
  • James Vincent

    Oct 11, 2016

    James Vincent

    The Galaxy Note 7 is dead

    Samsung issued the worldwide recall yesterday after at at least five replacement Note 7 handsets caught fire over the past week. "Samsung will ask all carrier and retail partners globally to stop sales and exchanges of the Galaxy Note 7," said the company yesterday. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission commended the decision, with chairman Elliot Kaye saying: "It is the right move for Samsung to suspend the sale and exchange of all Galaxy Note 7s."

    Consumers using any Note 7 (including replacement units) are urged to power them down immediately and return them to wherever they were originally purchased. Carriers have issued statements letting customers know that replacement Note 7s can be exchanged for another handset from Samsung or other manufacturers.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 11, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    FAA reiterates warning that no Galaxy Note 7 phones may be turned on or charged in flight

    Delta Airlines (STOCK)

    The FAA has reiterated its position that airline passengers should power down and not use or charge Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices on airplanes, or put the phones in checked luggage. The statement comes after Samsung halted global sales of the Note 7 following a series of fires in purportedly "safe" phones after a recall last month.

    In addition to stopping sales of new Note 7 devices, Samsung also instructed current owners of the phone to immediately "power down" the phones and return them for a refund or for another phone.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 10, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Samsung just recalled the Galaxy Note 7 — without using the word recall

    galaxy note 7
    James Bareham / The Verge

    Samsung just issued a worldwide recall of all versions of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone — only it never used the word recall. The company has asked all its partners to immediately halt sales of all versions of the phone, original and replacement, and advises all owners to immediately power down their devices.

    In a statement emailed to The Verge, a Samsung spokesperson said:

    Read Article >
  • Jacob Kastrenakes

    Oct 10, 2016

    Jacob Kastrenakes

    Samsung is shutting down Note 7 sales worldwide

    Samsung has requested that all of its sales partners stop offering the Galaxy Note 7, following reports of several additional fires over the past few days. It's asking stores and phone carriers worldwide to stop selling and exchanging the replacement units, which were supposedly safe from suddenly bursting into flames.

    All Note 7 units currently in consumers hands should be powered down, Samsung says, including replacement units. On its recall page, Samsung says that Note 7 owners "need" to either exchange their phone for another kind of smartphone or obtain a refund.

    Read Article >
  • Oct 10, 2016

    Dan Seifert and Jordan Golson

    Sprint and Best Buy cease sales of replacement Galaxy Note 7 smartphones

    Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 mess keeps getting messier: Sprint has just announced that it is halting sales of replacement units of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, following the numerous reports of devices catching fire. Sprint follows AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, which have all made similar moves over the past couple of days. Best Buy has also announced that it is ceasing sales of the beleaguered Note 7.

    A Sprint spokesperson confirmed the announcement to The Verge. The carrier will let current Note 7 customers exchange their phone for any other device, if they wish. The full statement is below:

    Read Article >
  • Nilay Patel

    Oct 10, 2016

    Nilay Patel

    Samsung is sending incomprehensible emails to Note 7 owners looking for a refund

    note 7 in a puddle
    James Bareham / The Verge

    Samsung is reportedly halting production of the Galaxy Note 7 after several more phones set themselves on fire over the weekend — phones that were themselves recall replacements for the original batch of defective phones. It’s safe to say that the entire situation is a disaster; as The Verge’s Jordan Golson says, the Note 7 is "a fundamentally defective product and it should be pulled from the market without delay."

    And it’s carriers that have had to step up and handle the Note 7 issue — Samsung itself has been alarmingly quiet about the issue, and it hasn’t made the process or scope of the actual issue terribly clear to customers at all. Just look at this email exchange, sent to The Verge by a senior executive at a large tech company trying to replace his Note 7:

    Read Article >
  • James Vincent

    Oct 10, 2016

    James Vincent

    Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 disaster: what's the latest?

    Amid the depressingly familiar horror of US politics this weekend, you might have forgotten all about another disaster that's been in the news lately — Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 crisis. What started out as a few isolated reports of exploding batteries in late August has continued to gather pace. Samsung initially delayed shipments, then issued a worldwide recall on September 1st, before sending out replacement Note 7 devices that same month. But over the last week there have been multiple reports of replacements catching fire, too. Here's the latest:

    Replacement Note 7 devices that Samsung has sent out to customers are proving to be as unsafe as the originals. Since Thursday there have been a total of (1, 2, 3, 4) five replacement phones catching fire, the latest happening in Texas. To be clear, these are the devices that Samsung claims are safe. They are not.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 10, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Verizon will also stop issuing replacement Galaxy Note 7 phones

    James Bareham / The Verge

    Verizon announced late tonight that it would no longer offer replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones to its customers, joining fellow US carriers T-Mobile and AT&T, and other carriers around the world in halting sales of the device. Verizon’s decision comes after it was reported earlier tonight that Samsung was halting production of new Note 7 phones while the investigation is ongoing.

    At least five replacement Note 7 phones caught fire in the US alone this week, and federal regulators with the Consumer Product Safety Commission are working to investigate the incidents.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 10, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Samsung is suspending production of the Galaxy Note 7, says Korean news agency

    James Bareham / The Verge

    Samsung is suspending production of the Galaxy Note 7 after a number of replacement phones — those that Samsung claimed were safe after a recall — caught fire and sent at least one person to the hospital. The report comes from the Korean news agency Yonhap. The New York Times corroborates the news citing a person familiar with the production stoppage.

    The halt in production is said to be in cooperation with safety regulators in the US, China, and Korea, according to Yonhap.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 9, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    T-Mobile is second US carrier to halt Galaxy Note 7 sales, giving $25 credit to affected customers

    note 7 in a puddle
    James Bareham / The Verge

    T-Mobile is halting sales of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 after a number of the supposedly "safe" replacement phones caught fire this week, according to a company spokesperson who spoke to The Verge. It will also give any customers who return their Note 7 a $25 credit on their bill. It makes T-Mobile the second major US carrier, after AT&T, to cease selling the product. T-Mobile also issued a statement addressing the situation:

    Samsung says it is "working diligently" with authorities to investigate the fires, which number at least five to this point in the US alone. A leaked memo from Australia’s largest carrier suggests the company has ceased shipments of the Note 7 entirely.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 9, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Samsung is 'pausing' shipments of the Galaxy Note 7 to Telstra, says internal memo

    James Bareham / The Verge

    Samsung has "temporarily paused" shipments of replacement Galaxy Note 7 phones to at least one carrier partner, according to an internal memo from Australian carrier Telstra obtained by The Verge. The memo advises of changes to the Note 7 Global Exchange program, revealing that Samsung has halted supply of Galaxy Note 7 phones to the carrier after reports of fires in the US.

    It goes on to note that Samsung is "confident" in the Note 7 and has "no reason to believe it’s not safe." This is a good — albeit delayed — first step from Samsung and follows an announcement from US carrier AT&T that the company will no longer sell the Galaxy Note 7 to customers.

    Read Article >
  • Jordan Golson

    Oct 9, 2016

    Jordan Golson

    Samsung says it's 'working diligently' as fifth replacement Note 7 burns

    Daniel Franks

    Another replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has caught fire, this one in Houston, Texas. Daniel Franks was at lunch with his daughter and wife when their replacement caught fire while sitting on the table, he told The Verge in an interview. It had been replaced at a Best Buy store in late September.

    Franks said that his eight-year-old daughter regularly plays Minecraft on the phone and wondered what could have happened if she was holding it or it was in his pocket or sitting on a nightstand.

    Read Article >