Samsung Galaxy Update Sends Phones Into Endless Loop

Should I factory reset?

That is the question many users of older Galaxy phones are asking themselves right now, as reports spread of devices going into an endless loop of rebooting after installing the latest Galaxy update.

“Affected phones include the Galaxy S10 series (S10, S10+, S10e, S10 Lite, S10 5G) and Galaxy Note 10 series (Note 10, Note 10+, Note 10 5G) devices are no longer working,” reports 9 to 5 Google. “The Galaxy M51 and Galaxy A90 also appear to be having issues for some.”

According to various reports on social media forums, the problems seems to have stemmed from a faulty Samsung SmartThings Framework update.

A factory reset has been suggested by several people as a way out, but others are reporting this morning that they’ve lost crucial data that wasn’t backed up on an external device or cloud.

Others can’t remember exactly what they had backed up, and what they could afford to lose if they did a factory reset. Some had to be at work, and didn’t know whether to reset so they were contactable, or leave the phone in loop.

“Happened to me yesterday,” said one social media post on a forum about the calamity. “A factory reset fixed it. Most of my data was on SD card or on cloud, so I luckily didn’t lose too much.”

“Hit me this morning,” wrote another. “It sucks, I was just about to get a new phone too. I lost about 500GB of data. Huge shame and I’m really hoping Samsung will be held accountable.”

“Add me to the list of victims … I hope you get better results than I have.”

One Galaxy user said they had contacted Samsung on X in recent hours and “they say they’re actively working on a fix but have no ETA”.

“An apology isn’t gonna fix everything I lost,” said one user.

And another spoke for many luddites when they asked: “What would a normal, day-to-day user who knows little about tech and flashing update do in this case?”

PCMag reports that “some users have reported limited success flashing firmware using Samsung’s Odin to avoid losing data to a factory reset, although that seems to be very hit-and-miss”.

Samsung has since pulled the faulty patch (v2.2.02.1) and Android Authority reports it’s been replaced by 2.2.03.1.