Pixel 8 crashed and won’t boot

Gjaiudtv

Today I opened up the settings app and the screen froze and became unresponsive. The device powered down (I held the power button for about 30 seconds - unclear if that’s why it powered down). And now I cannot get the device to boot at all. Nothing shows up on the screen.

It has been plugged in for 30 minutes and battery was at 57% when this happened. Assistance is appreciated as I rely on this device for work.

Gjaiudtv

Gjaiudtv update: the device finally turned on after holding the power button and volume down.

I still would like to investigate what caused this issue to avoid it in the past. It happened after I disabled location altogether. I got a notification from google play services that it tried to show a dialogue and then the phone crashed.

To Anyone reading this: BACK UP YOUR STUFF!

Thanks

Croak3114

Had the exact same thing happen on pixel 8 pro. Only differenc is mine froze and i forced a reboot by holding the power button and it didnt turn back on. Power button and volume down made it boot again.

Gjaiudtv

The other thing I noticed was that my battery was draining abnormally fast. It’s better now.

eyes_uncl0uded

I booted my Pixel 8 down at 80% battery a few hours ago. Picked it up minutes ago and it won't start with any combination of buttons. Trying not to panick, but glad to hear it's not just me.

Neither setting it on a wireless charger or plugging it into a wall charger gives any response- there's no charging animation. I'm going to leave it on the wall charger and cross my fingers.

Other than holding power and volume down, what are my options? Should I start troubleshooting via adb?

eyes_uncl0uded

My device isn't recognized via adb

eyes_uncl0uded

Holding power and volume up for 25 seconds got it to boot. Very strange.

Zarkorix

Experiencing the exact same issue on a Pixel 8. GOS randomly freezes, no clear pattern or trigger. Screen becomes unresponsive and eventually holding the power + volume up buttons will bring the device back to life with a reboot but it can take 5-10 minutes and numerous attempts before this works. Running 2025041100. Network location off.

m_ois

Same here with my Pixel 8, noticed it since 26th of April 2025. And it got worse. Today I rebooted it the sixth time.
Described the behavior before I found this post here: [https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/22058-freeze-and-black-screen-pixel-8-while-using-or-after-restart]

locked

Wow, what strange behavior. I have a P8 and so far, non of this has happened, i am wondering if it's a battery related issue? In order to preserve my battery i have set not to charge past 80%, ans I try to not let it go below 40% except once in a while.

m_ois

I use multiple user-accounts on my phone, system-updates are only possible with the owner-account. I saw that my phone has updated to Android 15 and GOS build 2025042500. (Honestly I don´t know if there was allready Android 15 installed before). But I know the latest build version 2025042500 newly got installed. After rebooting the phone (see problems above) I always switched to my secondary user-profile immediatly. Maybe this was a problem. I recogniced now, that there was a system-task running (seen in my notifications bar), which updates all apps after the system-update. Maybe due to switching immediatly to the secondary user-profile, this update precess got stopped. Now I let it run under owner-userprofile until this App-updating process has finished. Until now I have no problems anymore. But it was still an hour ago... We will see in the next days if this was the problem.

Does anybody of you know if this App-update precess got stopped if I switch to a secondary-userprofile while it is updating? Or should it run in the background also if the user got switched during this process?

m_ois

OK, my guess regarding Automatic APP actualisation Witz the owner-profile (dritten above) was not the problem. :( After everything got updates and actualized the problem was still here. The Pixel 8 freezes and got a black screen several times. I observed this behavior always while i usw the phone activley, but in different apps and in different sitiations. I observed this problem since saturday. This was the day after the release oft Build 2025042500. Is it possible that there is a bug or a Problem with this Build?

m_ois

Also opened a issue for that freeze and blackscreen problem here: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/5344
Please also contribute there...

PaladFarad

Today my Pixel 8a got freezed after switching users. The Pin screen didn't fully showed up. I then pressed the Power-button until the screen turned off. After pressing the power-button and volume up button for a wile the device booted up again.
Using Build: 20250425000.

m_ois

Please also read along here: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/5344
There is some help from user: testinger
I reportet a few kernel crash reports there and testinger answered. For example the following...
_"The first tpmbstone seems like a bug in an app (org.woheller69.ttsengine). The 2nd looks harmless. The 3rd is a bunch of zeroed data so perhaps that happened during a bigger crash and it couldn't get the crash report saved.

All 3 kernel crash reports indicate a hard lockup was detected which implies some kind of driver, firmware or hardware issue. It could be an upstream kernel bug. It likely isn't caused by anything we change, but could have been caused by the fact that we update the Linux kernel GKI LTS revision to the latest upstream release."_

Is there anybody out there also having big troubles with kernel crashes / black screen / freezes with Pixel 8 256GB using Graphene OS?
Is there anybody out there having no problems at all with Pixel 8 256GB and running Graphene OS on it? Without many crashes a day?
I want to figure out if my phone / my hardware is the problem or the software / OS?
Can anybody help me? Thank you!
What would you do in my case?

IwantToBeFree

m_ois I do experience issues at booting my P8 256Go.

IwantToBeFree

After having the phone plugged, charging for a while, playing with the power button multiple times and multiple boot loops, here are some state transitions I noticed :

...
black-screen
P8 tries to boot itself (without even having pushed myself on the power button). Screen displays the "Your device is loading a different operating system", displays a push button icon on the left for if I want to interrupt, ...
after waiting, it switches to a colored "Google" logo
then animated white and grey grapheneOS logo for a while
a white rectangular popup titled "Power Off", a wheel turning and a text indicating that it is "Shutting down..."
black-screen and vibration
white battery logo with a black lightning
"1%" (battery indication) or boot screen (i don't remember the order)
blackscreen
"3%" if i click on power-button
blackscreen
"9%" if i click on power-button
if i click on power-button longer, boot-screen
grapheneOS logo
keypad asking for PIN is displayed
fingerpring for owner
keypad for owner PIN

After that all is ok and i see a system update. Ok until next poweroff I guess. I usually do not power-off my phone myself and it thus shuts-down when it has no more battery.

While boots were looping, I unplugged and quickly saw low-battery icon, with a small quantity drawn in red. After re-plugging the charger I saw a battery icon with a lightning bolt.

This inquiry makes me think that it's an issue with a battery too low to finish the boot process and thus powering off before finishing. Then it directly tries a new boot process, while the battery is still too low to succeed. Etc. This loop seems to continue until stopped.

A stopping solution might be to fully empty the battery and replug the charger or to use the power-button at the right time of the loop. When ? I haven't yet found out.

I use a google fast-charger with all the tricky protocols. This might be playing some role.

de0u

IwantToBeFree The yellow "different operating system" screen prompts to tap the power button to pause booting. Tapping the power button at that point will pause booting, so it is possible to charge the battery for a while before tapping the power button again to boot.

Chipper

Although maybe unlikely I think its worth considering the faulty screens on some '8's' , there is a condition that sometimes presents on the 8s where you will get a green pixilated screen, a vertical line running along the screen, or in my case also the screen will sometimes just fail, when this happened the first few times, i thought the phone was buggered i tried rebooting by holding down different key compinations, etc but it didnt appear to do anything sometimes id see the loading screen then black again.. anyway while i think it unlikey it is worth trying to apply pressure in the bottom right area of the screen as there is a known issue with some 8s which google recognised and did an official warrenty screen replacement program, where the screens were incorrectly affixed causing a range of display issues, which are often temporarily remedied by applying pressure on the screen (presumably its a connection issue and this pressure makes the connection)

IwantToBeFree

de0u This clearly is a solution but the time window to click is relatively short relative to the full booting attempt iteration. Holding the power button 30'' while the graphene logo is displayed reboots into the state displaying "different OS" with the toggleable button.

IwantToBeFree

I wonder if having these booting loops at very low battery level for a while is not severely damaging the battery. My phone may show some lower battery sustainability compared to when i bought it.