Owners of the Pixel 6 series, be careful tinkering your phones at the moment. A bug has surfaced in recent days that is quite serious and may lead to your phone being bricked.
Over on Google’s Pixel Phone help community, a growing number of users are posting to inform Google that their Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, and Pixel 6a phones are now bricked after performing a factory reset.
In one thread that started on June 23, a user said they tried to factory reset their device, but it then got stuck on a boot screen with an error that only lets it return to recovery mode. Several folks have joined the thread to report similar happenings. In fact, so many users reported it to Google that they jumped into the thread after escalating the issue to confirm that this is a known bug. There is no word yet on a fix.
Unfortunately, Google has not yet said what the cause is, which software you would need to be on for this to happen, etc. At least one user was still on a May build of Android when their phone bricked. Others on the Android Beta subreddit have chimed in, so they may not be running fully stable builds.
We’ll do our best to report back with a fix from Google. Until then, take it easy on your Pixel 6.