iPhone 6 Plus Explodes In Hong Kong While Charging Overnight

Apple’s smartphones are hot-ticket items in China -- perhaps a little too hot for one Hong Kong woman, who claims her iPhone 6 Plus exploded while it was charging.

The woman -- referred to only by her surname, Tseng -- started her iPhone charging overnight around 1 a.m. local time after playing a few games on it, according to Chinese tabloid Apple Daily. At around 8 a.m. she was woken by a loud bang and a burning iPhone, which she extinguished with a pillow. No injury was reported, but Tseng intends to seek compensation from Apple.

Tseng claimed she was using authentic Apple products, noting she was using an iPad charger to charge her iPhone instead of the one that came in the box, according to the report. Generally, Apple’s latest iPhones can be plugged in to any Apple charger. But if the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are plugged in to an iPad power adapter, they can take advantage of a faster charging rate, according to MacRumors.

The exact cause of the explosion is no yet known, but it’s possible that overcharging is to blame. “The auto power cut-off feature of the handset for charging could have been out of order, hence the battery was overcharged and exploded due to excessive heat,” engineer Lu Kwok Keung, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told Apple Daily.

While exploding iPhones are generally rare, they’re not unheard-of. In February, a Long Island, New York, man received second- and third-degree burns from an iPhone 5C that exploded in his pocket, according to WABC TV New York. Last year, one Arizona man’s iPhone 6 caught on fire after it bent in his front pocket, according to the New York Daily News.