The Galaxy Note 7 Got Its Own Announcement at the Airport Gate

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 7 on 2 August 2016 and released it on 19 August at between $850 and $890. Reviews were excellent. It was, by broad agreement, the best large phone anyone had made. Within eight weeks it was a forbidden hazardous material under United States federal transport regulation.

The First Recall

On 2 September 2016, Samsung suspended sales and announced a global exchange covering roughly 2.5 million devices. Mobile chief Koh Dong-jin fronted the press conference in Seoul and delivered a sentence that deserves preservation. There was a tiny problem in the manufacturing process, he said, so it was very difficult to find out. He estimated the fault might affect around one unit in 42,000, and described the cost as a big amount that is heartbreaking.

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission issued recall 16-266 on 15 September, covering about a million units, citing 92 reports of batteries overheating, 26 burns and 55 property damage incidents including fires in cars and a garage.

Then the Replacements Caught Fire

On 5 October, Southwest flight 994 was evacuated on the ground at Louisville before takeoff. The passenger, Brian Green, had bought his device two weeks earlier at an AT&T store as part of the recall, and it had passed Samsung’s screening. He had just powered it down when it popped and began smoking, and he dropped it on the cabin floor.

The detail that ends the argument comes from the Louisville Fire Department arson unit, whose Captain Kevin Fletcher reported that the heat damage was severe enough that the model of phone could not be identified.

Samsung halted global sales on 10 October and discontinued the product on the 11th, stating that for the benefit of consumers’ safety it had stopped sales and exchanges and consequently decided to stop production. Roughly eighteen billion dollars came off the share price that day. The CPSC issued a second recall on 13 October taking the total to about 1.9 million units, with chairman Elliot Kaye stating that the fire hazard with the original and with the replacement was simply too great for anyone to risk it.

Two Recalls, Two Completely Different Faults

This is the part that is genuinely remarkable and almost always flattened into one story. Samsung put 700 engineers on it, tested over 200,000 devices and 30,000 batteries, and reported back on 23 January 2017 alongside investigators from UL, Exponent and TÜV Rheinland.

The original batteries had a design fault. The pouch was too small for what was inside it, so the electrodes bent in the curve along the long side, with damage concentrated in the upper corner, until the positive and negative terminals touched.

The replacement batteries, from a different supplier, had a manufacturing fault instead. Faulty ultrasonic welding left sharp burrs that scraped through the insulation between layers until they punctured it. Some cells were also missing insulating tape altogether, attributed to rushed production.

Samsung recalled the same phone twice for two unrelated battery defects from two different suppliers. The odds against that are considerable, and the second one happened because of the urgency created by the first.

Banned From the Sky

The Federal Aviation Administration advised on 8 September that passengers should not turn on or charge these devices on board aircraft and not stow them in checked baggage. On 14 October the Department of Transportation went further with an emergency order effective at noon the following day: owners may not transport the device on their person, in carry-on baggage, or in checked baggage on any flight to, from or within the United States.

Violation carried a civil penalty of up to $179,933, and the possibility of criminal prosecution carrying fines and up to ten years’ imprisonment. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx acknowledged the inconvenience and noted that even one fire incident inflight poses a high risk of severe personal injury and puts many lives at risk.

For a period in late 2016, airline staff read out the name of a specific consumer electronics product at the gate, alongside the safety briefing. American Airlines announced that due to a recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, the FAA advises these devices should be powered off and not connected to any power source while on board.

The punchline is verified. In January 2017 the FAA dropped the announcement requirement, citing the high degree of public awareness of the ban. They stopped saying it because absolutely everybody already knew.

The Bill, Stated Accurately

Samsung cut its third-quarter operating profit guidance by about 2.6 trillion won, then estimated a further mid-three-trillion-won impact across the following two quarters. The famous figure of $5.3 billion is the press adding those two numbers together, and Bloomberg ran it first. Samsung never stated it as a total. We mention this because that number gets quoted as a company admission roughly once a week and it is not one.

The wider damage did not land. Customers returned 97 percent of US devices. Samsung sold unused stock back as the refurbished Galaxy Note Fan Edition in July 2017, limited to 400,000 units, with the battery reduced from 3,500 to 3,200 milliamp hours. It sold out.

The Verdict

Somebody built a mod for Grand Theft Auto V replacing the game’s sticky bomb with a Note 7. Samsung filed a copyright takedown against a video of it. The uploader challenged the takedown and the video was reinstated, which is the correct outcome and also the moment the company should have recognised it had lost.

The Note 7 was an excellent phone that failed in the one way a phone in your pocket must never fail, twice, for unrelated reasons. Everything after that was Samsung handling it about as well as anyone could handle a product their own government had classified as too dangerous to carry onto an aeroplane.