Surface Duo 2 Calling 911 at Random?!!

Anonymous
2022-11-10T18:08:31+00:00

My Surface Duo 2 has recently started an alarming new behavior. When I have it plugged in to Android Auto in the car and I receive a text message, it will sometimes start a random phone call with an unknown number! I never hear anything except a couple clicks before I notice and quickly hang up. It doesn't show any outgoing or incoming calls in my call history, but yesterday when this happened several times over the span of a few minutes I received five TTY voicemail messages from the phone number 911 (yes, it was literally the digits 9-1-1, not just a spoofed caller ID). You can't get calls from 911--if the emergency services call you, it'll show up as a regular number--so my only guess is that my phone dialed 9-1-1, and because I hung up, the emergency operator or a machine responded with a direct TTY message in case I was deaf, and it shows up on my voicemail as 9-1-1 because I initiated the call.

I'm aware that there's a new Emergency SOS feature in Android 12 that calls 911 if you press the power button 5 times, and I know the button sometimes presses itself when sitting in the cup holder, but 5 times in rapid succession seems highly unlikely. And that wouldn't explain why this only happens at the exact same time I receive a text message. I'm suspicious that there is some sort of bug causing this, but regardless, I think Microsoft needs to have the SOS feature disabled by default, at least when the phone is closed. You get absolutely no visual or aural indication from the phone or Android Auto before it calls the police, which is obviously not good.

Surface | Surface Duo | Safety and security

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-11-10T20:15:23+00:00

    Hello Jonathanok100,

    Please go into your setting and verify the feature is turned on or not:

    settings -> safety & emergency ->SOS

    Then if you would like to keep it active, consider have it play the alarm countdown.

    Thanks,

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-11-13T20:30:46+00:00

    My surface duo 1 is also showing alarming behaviors and it started after the android 12 update. My phone now automatically shuts down and reboot. When it does reboot into android it tries to automatically call 911. In about a minute it reboots again. I am trying to do a hard reset by holding the power and volume down button but cant seem to get into the menu. I tried various attempts to do factory reset within the 1 minute frame before it restarts but It does not do it. Can anyone offer any suggestions. Thank you

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-11-19T19:24:53+00:00

    Hi John, thanks for your response. I did have the SOS feature enabled at the time that this happened; I've since disabled it as I'm worried the countdown alarm won't go off or will be silent if there is a bug triggering it in the first place.

    I do think Microsoft should look into this though to see if there's a reproducible bug causing it. Every time it happened I was using Android Auto with navigation and received an SMS/MMS. When Android Auto flashed the toast notification, the screen flashed black for a split second before starting the call.

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