Phone Catches Fire, Explodes Inside Man's Pocket

A man suffered injuries to his leg after his phone overheated and burst into flames in his pant pocket. The incident took place in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh on Friday.

Speaking to technology news website Fossbytes, 31-year-old Madhu Babu said just when he was about to leave home for work when he felt his phone, Xiaomi Redmi 6A, getting warmer in his pant pocket. He heard an explosion before noticing smoke coming from the pocket. He immediately took out the phone from the pocket and threw on the road just outside his home. Suddenly, the device burst into flames. Babu said his phone was burning as if “someone dipped it in gasoline and then started a fire.”

Babu said he purchased the device from a store in April this year and that the phone was working properly. He further said he charged the device for two hours on Friday morning. Photos of the phone showed the device entirely burned. Babu said he would have sustained serious injuries had he not used a protective cover for his phone.

In a statement to the website, a Xiaomi India spokesperson said, “At Xiaomi customer safety is of utmost importance and we take such matters extremely seriously. All our devices go through various levels of stringent quality tests to ensure that the quality of the device is not compromised at any level. Xiaomi is also the market leader when it comes to after sales service quality, as per a report by Red Quanta research (Q1, 2019). We have strong network of After sales to ensure that all customer concerns are addressed with utmost priority and we have one of the highest Turn Around Time (TAT), with 96% cases getting resolved in just four hours of getting reported. Currently, we are investigating the matter and will share an update as soon as we have more details.”

An investigation was ongoing and the exact cause of the explosion was not known.