Pixel phones keep dropping the ball in a potentially life-threatening way

The smartphone has become our modern Swiss Army knife, bundling practically unlimited disparate functions into a single pocketable device. Still, arguably the most important feature in any smartphone is that it’s, well, a phone, letting us make calls from anywhere. In emergency situations, the phone part of the smartphone is all the more important — but Google’s phones are reportedly having a hard time there.

Android Police has rounded up some recent reports from Reddit that say the Pixel 10, Pixel 9, and Pixel 8 have all had issues contacting emergency services in the US, with calls failing to go through. These reports are anecdotal, but any failed call to 911 could potentially have disastrous consequences.

On the Google Pixel subreddit, user Fabulous_Disaster730 writes that their Pixel 9 Pro showed an error message and then restarted when they tried to call 911 on T-Mobile. In the comments on that post, user DazzFX shares a similar experience with the 9 Pro XL on Cricket Wireless. User sarge_888 had similar problems with the 10 Pro XL on AT&T.

In a separate thread, user Omnomfish describes the same problem on their Pixel 8, writing that the phone couldn’t connect to emergency services until they enabled Wi-Fi calling.

This isn’t the first time Google’s phones have dropped the ball contacting emergency services. Reports of Pixel phones struggling to call 911 have popped up intermittently for years.

As is always the case with tech issues reported on social media, it’s hard to get a sense of how widespread this problematic 911 behavior really is. There are millions of Pixel phones in circulation, and a handful of reports doesn’t necessarily spell out a pervasive problem. Still, given how vital access to emergency services is, any reports that particular phones are struggling to contact 911 should be taken seriously.

I’ve reached out to Google about these reports. We’ll update this post with any comment we get back.