The hottest smartphone story of 2016 — quite literally — was the Galaxy Note 7. Innumerable fires led Samsung to eventually issue a global recall and eat a $3 billion loss. Now, as though it was the punchline to an unfunny cosmic joke, the factory that produced the faulty batteries that caused the Galaxy Note 7 fires has also burst into flames.
There had been a lot of speculation around what had caused the spectacular failure of the Galaxy Note 7. While the battery itself seemed like the most obvious culprit, some reports pegged flawed design choices. Tolerances were too tight, one report said, and the batteries didn’t have enough room to expand safely inside the super-slim Note 7.
Last month, however, Samsung issued the findings of their internal investigation. They assembled a team of 200 engineers and tasked them with analyzing 200,000 devices and a further 30,000 batteries. President of mobile Koh Dong-Jin announced that it was, in fact, those pesky batteries.
We probably shouldn’t be too surprised, then, at the article that the South China Morning Post just published: a fire broke out this morning at a Samsung SDI factory where those batteries were made.
According to a Samsung spokesperson, it was a “minor fire.” I think we can all agree that there are fires of different sizes and that you can’t always tell how big a fire was based on the amount of smoke it produces, but that picture sure looks like it captured more than a “minor fire.”
Firefighters say that battery components and some partially-assembled batteries caused the blaze. They sent 19 fire engines and 110 firefighters to the scene, but, again… minor fire!
