The Image That Broke Millions Of Phones – Never Download It

When amateur photographer and scientist Gaurav Agrawal uploaded a photo to the internet, he didn’t expect it to destroy millions of Android phones.

Agrawal took a photo of the sunset and later uploaded it to the popular photo sharing site Flickr for other users to view and download for their personal use.

However, when Android phone users, including Samsung and Google Pixel phone users, downloaded it, they faced issues.

Some users reported that when they tried to use the image as a wallpaper, they found that it was causing an issue on their phones.

Devices started turning on and off, requiring a factory reset – a process that erases all data.

Speaking about the phenomenon he unintentionally caused, Agrawal told the BBC: “I didn’t do anything intentionally. I’m sorry that people ended up facing problems.”

Agrawal admitted that he was an iPhone user and therefore was unaware of the problems his photo was causing for Android owners.

“It was a magical night,” Agrawal added, reflecting on the time he took the photo. “It was dark and cloudy and we thought it wouldn’t be a great sunset. We were ready to leave when things started to change.”

As a result of the issue spreading for the wrong reasons, Agrawal’s Flickr post now includes a warning for Android users.

Ken Munro and Dave Lodge from security firm Pen Test Partners explained to the BBC why the glitch happened: “As digital image quality improves, phones have to check the colour space of the image to know how to display it in the best possible way. A phone knows how to display the right shade of green, for example.

They added that there are “several ways to define a color space” and that it is possible to create images that contain more color information than some devices can handle.

They continued: “What happened here is that the way some phones dealt with these conditions went wrong.”

They concluded that “the phone crashes because it doesn’t know how to handle it properly, and the software developers probably didn’t think this could happen.”