Old Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones being bootlooped

Updates are supposed to make our devices better: give them more features, fix bugs, and address security concerns. But there’s always the risk anytime you’re changing the software that a device relies upon that you’re going to changing something that stops it from working — and nobody wants to have to start fresh with a factory reset. Sadly, it looks like Samsung users are facing a problem just like this, as they discover their phones unusable after installing a recent update.

Over the course of the past day, a growing number of reports about Galaxy phones stuck in bootloops have been surfacing online. Two of the busiest threads we’ve seen are those on Reddit started by users rbthompsonv and mikethespike056, and based on user complaints that have come in so far, it’s looking like this problem affects basically all Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note 10 series devices. That’s not necessarily an exhaustive list, though, and we also hear about the Galaxy M51 being impacted.

We haven’t seen any specific evidence that would point to a cause here, but one theory being discussed points to installation of a SmartThings Framework update preceding these problems. That at least seems plausible, considering that a new update just arrived, coinciding with the start of all these bootloops.

Unfortunately, the only advice we’ve seen for users experiencing all this is exactly what we wanted to avoid: a full factory reset. Since we can’t complete a proper boot, that means going into recovery mode. Hopefully you’ve got a recent backup of your apps and data.

We’ve reached out to Samsung hoping to learn more about what might be causing this problem, how widespread the issue is, and if there’s anything less drastic than a full reset that users can do to get their aging Galaxy handsets back to full working order. We’ll update this post to share what we learn.