I work in the IT department for a county government, and my phone spontaneously and randomly reboots whenever I'm in the courthouse, most often while I'm in the IT department; I'm the only person in the courthouse who has this problem, and there is zero literature about this sort of thing online. The other day I was trying to text somebody and it kept rebooting on me before I could even start to write the text. I walked all the way to the other side of the courthouse as far as I could away from the IT department only for it to constantly reboot less than 5 seconds after putting in my password. Then it tells me that I've made too many incorrect password attempts after making Zero incorrect attempts and that I was locked out. But I wasn't locked out for 5, 8, or 10 minutes, it turned itself all the way up to 11 and locked me out for 24 hours! Not only that, but after the 24 hours were up, the clock reset itself and continues to reset itself every time I turn the phone off to troubleshoot it.
I've looked on Smartthings to see if I can unlock it there, but it wants to send a code to my phone to verify that it's me, so I can't use that. I'm really trying not to factory reset my phone cause I havne't backed it up in at least 2-3 months.
I actually have tried that. In either October or November I booted into safe made both with and without networking. With networking: reboots. Without networking: no reboots. I brought my old A51 to work thinking I was smart, but it constantly rebooted so fast that I didn't even have time to put my password in; no sim card present, not even enough time to sign into the wifi.
I can't boot into safe mode right now because the security feature locks that out.
I was working with representatives through a Samsung app, but it was useless. Every time I responded to an agent, a different agent would respond back and after enough exchanges the agents would start to repeat themselves. Absolutely useless and disgraceful customer support.
Why would you not keep you phone on automatic backup and/or not back it up for 2-3 months? You work in IT, you know backups are important. If you don't want it to auto backup, you should at least manually back it up once a month, or after any change you make. You can even set a routine to auto sync your data on a schedule. Not keeping current backups makes any loss of data on you, so if you end up having to reset your phone, you will lose anything recent. But, still, an old backup is better than no backup. I guarantee you that if you have to send your phone for service, they will factory reset it and you will lose anything recent. At this point, forcing the phone into recovery mode and doing a factory reset may be your only option.
The fact that this only happens in one area of one place, makes me think that someone is messing with your phone remotely. Have any IT enemies at the courthouse?
Trust me, I've kicked it around in my head that somebody is doing this to me, but this started within 9 days of working here, it happens nowhere else but in the court house, especially in the vicinity of the IT department it happened in safe mode as well. Plus, a Dell tech came in one day and a coworkers phone started to wig out on him like it does me.
So nothing can help me get out of this and I just have to factory reset, huh? Any theories on what's happening in the first place? Cause every single time this happens I get a little annoyed that my brother is right about his flawless iPhones. What could cause two A series Samsungs to reboot like this?
I have no theories on what could cause this behavior other than hacking, since you say it only happens in one place and only to your phone (save the co-worker who had a random incident). Could be some kind of electronic interference messing with the internals of your phone. The A series, being budget devices, may have less shielding than the S series. Although, I have an A54 and haven't had any kind of problem like this; but I'm also not around an IT room on a regular basis. If you have a spare $100 or so, buy a refurbished device of another brand off Amazon to test and either use it as a backup device, or use it as your courthouse device. (or after your test, return it)
I just re-read this whole thread. You mentioned that when you went into safe mode with networking, the problem recurred. I would say try resetting your network connections, although this happening with two different devices would seem to indicate it not being a problem with the network hardware. Perhaps there's a defect in the access point node in the IT dept. combined with inadequate electronic shielding in the A series. As I said, if you have a few spare bucks see what happens with a different brand.
Well lesson learned. Budget phone + IT department w/server room = problems.
I factory reset my phone and had trouble getting setting it up cause I was still locked out with a fresh 24 hour timer. Turns out that my contacts weren't saved even though smartswitch is supposed to backup contacts that are saved to the phone. Thankfully my old A51 has 98% of my contacts on it, so it's not a total loss.
I'm upgrading to an S series next year.
Thank you for you time, realaud, and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Have your contacts synced with Google or better yet, transfer them to Google, and then you never have to worry about contacts again. I would never store them on my phone. With Google contacts I can access my contacts on any device.
I didnt say I was 100% positive the shielding was inadequate, just a guess. If it is, probably a shielded case might be cheaper and less troublesome than a whole new device. Might serve you well between now and then.
