Pixel 8 Bricked with newest Update

brickedpixel

Hello,

My Pixel 8 just bricked after installing the latest update.

Sequence of Events:

Phone displayed "reboot to install update" push notification - ignored it
Battery drained completely. Phone shuts off.
I plug in the phone and it starts up right away. It keeps resetting, because it had not enough power to complete the boot process...
I interrupt the boot process by pressing the power button on startup and let it charge for 10 minutes.
When I resumed the Boot process, the phone started up normally, displaying the pin code field inside the booted OS.
Suddenly the GrapheneOS logo from the boot screen pops back up.
After 1-2 seconds the screen goes dark.

I let it charge for 30 mins, so the battery is out of the equation. No charge icon appeared, the phone was completely dead, but I can see on the PowerBank LCD that it charges the phone in fast-charge mode.

Power button: No response. The screen stays completely black, even after plugging in the power cable.
The phone is completely shut down and not even able to show the charge screen.
I checked the connected WiFi devices of my router and the phone does not show up, so it’s not just a faulty display issue.

When I press the power button for over 30 secs the phone was able to restart.
It boots up seemingly fine first, but after 2-3 seconds the screen went dark again. The phone is completely unresponsive after that. I tried it 5 times now, no chance.
I can see that the battery was at ₄₀% charge, so that could not be the issue anymore.

Any help would be appreciated.

GrapheneOS

brickedpixel The latest update in the Stable channel at the time you made your post was 2025090300 from September 3rd which reached Stable on September 3rd due to being a very minor addition to 2025090200 to fix a Play Integrity API regression. 2025090500 didn't reach Stable due to some minor regressions and 2025090600 reached Stable after your initial post was made.

brickedpixel

Okay, this is an extremely weird Bug.

I kept trying and power-cycled my phone at least 20 times to speedrun to the OEM-Unlock enable switch.
It always shuts down after 2-5 seconds after the pin-code field shows up.
After many attempts, the system suddenly did not crash anymore. It is now stable for over 10 minutes. I reached the OEM Unlock button, now I will backup all relevant data left on the device.

So if anyone has the same Bug as me: Do not lose hope xD keep trying, maybe your system will suddenly work again out of the blue like mine.

Maybe it would be a good idea to keep the phone in charging mode when powered off and not immediately start the boot process when a charger is connected, like the stock Android on the Pixel does it.

raskolnikov9

I am likely affected by the same issue on a P8a.
The phone boots up to the PIN screen and goes dark after 2-5 seconds.
The affected version should be the most recent from the stable release channel.

brickedpixel

raskolnikov9 Im curious, did this happen to you after a normal/planned reboot, or was it after the battery was dead and it restarted multiple times?

Whispering_R

brickedpixel this seems like the same issue me and others have been experiencing. See threads:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/26079-phone-unresponsive-after-battery-dying-and-plugging-phone-in-to-charge
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/22206-help-my-pixel-8-pro-just-dead-this-morning/20
Wouldn't seem to be update related at first sight (other users don't mention it), although I'll admit that I also had the phone ask for an update the first time this happened, and I also ignored it as you did.

raskolnikov9

brickedpixel
This happened after a planned reboot. Battery was at around 80%.

After managing to login briefly, a failed update installation notification was displayed. Shortly thereafter, the screen went dark again.

My issue does not seem to be related to the state of charge, so it might be distinct from the ones mentioned by @Whispering_R.

raskolnikov9

Short update: after restarting the failing boot process many (>10) times, the system now booted successfully into a stable state.
The phone is running version 2025090300, does not display any failed update message anymore, and is optimizing apps. This suggests the phone was running on a previous version before the issue arose, and that the update terminated successfully (after many faulty boot sequences). I cannot confirm with certainty that the previous version was 2025090200, though it cannot have been much lower as the phone gets rebooted at least weekly with automatic system updates turned on.

de0u

raskolnikov9 Thanks for the report! It's good to hear that it's feeling better now.