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Samsung halts Android Oreo rollout on Galaxy S8 due to ‘unexpected’ restarts

Samsung halts Android Oreo rollout on Galaxy S8 due to ‘unexpected’ restarts

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Samsung Galaxy S8
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Samsung started rolling out Android Oreo for the Galaxy S8 at the beginning of the week, but then just hours later, it seemed to have stopped. Now Samsung is revealing why: it was causing some phones to randomly reboot, according to a statement given to SamMobile. Samsung says it hopes to roll out a fixed version of the update “as quickly as possible.”

SamMobile first reported that the update had been pulled on Monday, saying that it heard Samsung was already at work on a new version of the update. At the time, though, it wasn’t clear what had gone wrong. Samsung now says the problem affects both the S8 and S8 Plus in “a limited number of cases,” but clearly it was enough to halt the software’s rollout.

While this means that some S8 owners are going to be stuck on a buggy software release, Samsung hadn’t started to distribute the Oreo update worldwide, so the impact should be somewhat limited. It had started to appear on phones in India and a few European and Middle Eastern countries only. While it’s surprising that this would happen after months of beta testing the update, software rollouts are in part meant to catch issues like this before they become widespread, so on some level, the strategy worked.

Sorry to everyone eagerly awaiting those new emoji.