We were recently tipped off that some OnePlus 7 Pro owners are running into a significant but thankfully not widespread issue: Their phones appear to randomly turn off or shut down, potentially while they're even being used. The only means of resuscitation in such cases is manually rebooting into fastboot by holding down a combination of hardware buttons. Thankfully, OnePlus is both aware of the issue and planning a fix.

Reports don't appear to be as widespread as some previous issues have been, but the number of those affected is enough to make it clear this is a genuine problem, just one that seemingly only affects a minority of devices for some reason. The biggest thread on the subject over at the OnePlus forums has over 100 responses at the time of writing, though there are other posts and even a filed bug report for the issue.

Those that are affected will notice their device appears to be suddenly turned off, but can't be turned on via the usual means. Holding the volume up and power keys to reboot to fastboot mode is known to successfully trigger a restart (though allegedly holding the power button by itself isn't enough). The issue doesn't appear to discriminate when it comes to which model of the 7 Pro you have, and though some who previously experienced the issue haven't run into issues in the last couple of weeks, a smattering of other reports has continued up until today.

Curiously, part of the cause may actually be known, but the trigger for the issue isn't. A kernel developer by the name of pappschlump discovered that the OnePlus 7 Pro's kernel occasionally crashes due to a null pointer reference at a specific virtual address. Without a running kernel, the phone is effectively "dead" until it can be restarted.

Some support representatives told those affected that the company was aware of the problem. To confirm, we reached out to OnePlus, and a representative told us, "we are aware of this issue, and we will be issuing an update to address it." In the meantime, those that are affected at least have the fastboot workaround to successfully trigger a reboot, temporarily fixing the issue as it occurs.

Source: OnePlus Forums (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

Thanks: John Sonal