Samsung Galaxy Note9 reportedly catches fire inside a woman’s purse

The second-half of 2016 was a PR nightmare for South Korean tech giant Samsung, as dozens of Galaxy Note7s caught fire and exploded. This led to Samsung recalling all the Galaxy Note7 units from around the world and ultimately discontinuing the product. After thorough investigation, the battery inside the Note7 was found to be the culprit. After the Note7 debacle, Samsung has improved the QA measures for the batteries that go inside its smartphones, and, has also deployed an 8-point Battery Safety Check to ensure that the batteries are safe. Well, after Note7, Samsung launched the Note8 and Note9, and, it looks like the ghosts of the Note7 debacle are back to haunt Samsung as a Galaxy Note9 unit has reportedly caught fire.

According to a report by the New York Post, a brand new Galaxy Note9 unit of a woman, named Diane Chung, living in Long Island, caught fire inside her purse while she was in an elevator. As soon as the woman put the Note9 in her purse, “she heard a whistling and screeching sound, and she noticed thick smoke” coming out of her purse.

The smoke coming out of her purse due to burning Note9 created visibility issues inside the elevator, and, once she got out, she threw the Note9 on the floor. However, the phone was still burning and it only stopped after a “good samaritan” grabbed it “with a cloth and plunked it into a bucket of water”.

Now the truthfulness of this entire story is a bit hard to verify as we have no witnesses of this incidence, except Chung herself. Furthermore, it also kind of sounds weird that a “good samaritan” had a cloth and a bucket of water readily available at his disposal to put off the fire. Was there already a bucket of water available near the elevator or somewhere on the floor? Or did that “samaritan” just happened to be going somewhere with a bucket full of water? Perhaps this samaritan had a really good response time to this entire incident.

Either way, whatever the truth is, Chung has filed a lawsuit against Samsung in Queens Supreme Court, asking for “unspecified damages and a restraining order barring the sales of any Galaxy Note 9s”. In response, a Samsung spokesperson said “We have not received any reports of similar incidents involving a Galaxy Note9 device and we are investigating the matter“.